Rating game: Metacritic and Rottentomatoes

[Chris Knipp]

Ratings game--current offerings

This is in no way scientific or statistically significant, but I thought it would be interesting to compare the Metacritic and Rottentomatoes ratings of some of the top current films, July 2006, USA. I was surprised that the overall average score for the ten was almost exactly the same for both sites. However Metacritic clearly has less of a spread, 36-74 vs. Rottentomatoes' much more extreme ratings spread of 19-92. Given the closeness of assigned ratings on Metacritic, though I personally think it's a "better," more useable site (for one thing, it highlights some of the better critics), there isn't that much difference to be observed between critics' evaluations of The Devil Wears Prada and and An Inconvenient Truth, and though that's judicious on Metacritic's part, it's not entirely helpful, unless one considers the assigned percentages extremely accurate, which is hard to do. On the other hand Rottentomatoes' range shows their assigned ratings have to be viewed with greater scepticism.

It's interesting that judging by this, the critics rated the current top documentaries far above any fictional offerings. And they're agreed that Scoop, Peaceful Warrior, and Lady in the Warrior are at the bottom -- though I personally would not completely write off these three, especially not Scoop. I'm not disappointed in these evaluations, but I'm not sure any documentaries other than An Inconveneitnt Truth will be as well remembered as some of the fiction pieces, in times to come. Smith, Mann, Woody Allen, Shyamalan--we pay attention to these 'auteurs'' work, even when it's not their best.

These rating/review compendium sites aren't scientific either, but while what they're doing is far from an exact science, going by this sampling their spreads seem to be in the ballpark. Take them, and this post, with a grain of salt, but maybe they have some validity, after all. Has anybody got a better or alternate ratings site they's like to recommend? The scores and resulting rankings follow.

Metacritic=59.6*

An Inconvenient Truth 74
A Scanner Darkly 73
Who Killed the Electric Car 70
Clerks II 65
The Road to Guantanamo 64
Miami Vice 64
The Devil Wears Prada 61
Scoop 49
Peaceful Warrior 40
Lady in the Water 36

Rotten Tomatoes=59.5*

An Inconvenient Truth 92
Who Killed the Electric Car 89
The Road to Guantanamo 86
The Devil Wears Prada 77
A Scanner Darkly 62
Clerks II 61
Miami Vice 48
Scoop 39
Lady in the Water 22
Peaceful Warrior 19

*Average score for the ten

[oscar jubis]

Originally posted by Chris Knipp
I personally think it's a "better," more useable site (for one thing, it highlights some of the better critics)

Metacritic is based on reviews from 41 publications, all reasonably reputable. Their average score is weighed_they assign more significance to some of those critics/publications (including Variety, The New York Times, Voice and Reader when Hoberman and Rosenbaum write the reviews. This is based on personal observation since they won't reveal which are the preferred critics/publications) over others. Rotten Tomatoes includes reviews by among others: Commerce Appeal, Movie Mom at Yahoo!, Juicy Cerebellum, tonymedley.com, and Compuserve. To their credit, they have a sub-section called "Cream of the Crop" with a separate score that includes exclusively reviews from "reputable" sources.

Metacritic converts each review to a numerical score on a scale of 0 to 100. Rotten Tomatoes simply converts each review to either fresh or rotten and gives you the percentage of reviews that fall into the winning category. Metacritic is certainly the more ambitious and helpful site because it's more exclusive and because it's more "sensitive" (at Rotten Tomatoes, both a 2 1/2 and a 4-star review are simply categorized as "fresh").