Just a Minute: IMDB vs Rotten Tomatoes

This week the crew dissects ratings systems and why they may not mean as much as you're lead to believe.

Transcript

Hold up just a minute. This is Chase, Kyle, and Andrew, and we're bringing you another short episode, right Andrew? Yeah. Super short. Super short. Maybe shorter than the last one. Hopefully. Hopefully. Because I'm hungry. Are you? , I'm starved. , are you starved? You just had two protein bars.

Yeah, but what have I had to eat , the rest of the day? I have no idea. You were a grown man, so you have no idea. You're a grown man. You should have been able to feed yourself at your own home where you work. Mm. What did you have for B? What did you have for breakfast and lunch? I only had late breakfast.

 Of what? Four eggs, , some chicken sausage. Are you fucking kidding me? I had scrambled eggs, , a couple pieces of chicken sausage and some toast. That's it. What have you had since then? A bowl, two bowls of cereal. Two bowls of cereal. Rice krispies. And then those two. 

That's it. Do you want to know what I've had to eat today? No. You don't want to know? Or you, you don't know? I don't know. How would I know? I woke up and I had, uh. I had a couple slices of mango,  I had two of those, which you know how good they are, the birthday cake. Oh yeah. Kit Kats. I had two , little fingers of those. 

I had a 32 ounce of water with electrolytes in it, and that was breakfast.  And then for lunch, I don't eat lunch, so I didn't have lunch,  okay? But after I was done working out I had a protein shake,  okay?  And then  Nothing. 

. I've had a pack of Marlboro Reds and a sleeve of Oreo cookies. And some American Spirit and some Skull, baby. I went out to the Tesco and I started dippin Ugh, what a good time. Hey, we're off to a great start. We're on topic. We are really on topic here cause today we're talking about ratings.

Yay. We love to rate things. I rate Andrew's day.  A 10 I think he had a great day. That's what I like. I mean, it was a pretty solid day  Pretty happy except he's starved right now with his high protein breakfast. I mean I have always gotten  Lower blood sugar if I don't eat enough and it hits me hard of the most we're getting off trail here.

So true  I don't know if i'm  hyperglycemic or what? Oh, you're diabetic baby. You're in it I mean, I could be a chop your foot off, never been tested. So,  so today we're looking at ratings. , we're going to compare rotten tomatoes with IMDb. I know this is a subject out in the movie world. Kyle, how do you use rating systems?

Sparingly and not really at all. If we're being honest,  I usually go by word of mouth, or if I see a trailer that doesn't give away the goat in the first, , couple of frames, or if it's a franchise that I like, like alien  or Star Wars. , not a lot of those anymore.  I'll probably watch it.

When it comes down to like, how good is it? If it's something that I know came out a while ago,  if I'm looking for a good movie, I don't want to be upset, I'll look. But,  for the most part, , I'm not really getting IMDb to go, Oh my God, what did everybody else say about it? I need to know what they said about it so I can make my decision about it.

Because I don't fucking care what most people think. Because most people are fucking idiots.  Andrew,  how do you use your ratings? Strong words there, Kyle. ,  I mean, , it's pretty easy to, , figure out what's gonna be a shitty movie, and what's actually going to be worth your while. There are some times, like, if I'm debating on whether I want to go spend money in the theaters, I'll log on to IMDB and see what, , the recent average is.

Like, within a week, , or like a couple days, a movie's been released. , you can see kind of like a baseline, , what the movie is. And so sometimes , I'll do a little cheating to see if , it's worth my time. Cause I do think, , Those ratings are fairly accurate,  truth be told. Some are off, some are, , right on the money.

, it's hit or miss with some, but I think overall a lot will give you a pretty good, , look into whether the movie's worth watching. So if there's something in the theaters that I want to see, and I'm just kind of unsure about it,  I'll hop on , and see how the numbers hold up.  The reason we're bringing this up is because someone, , Asked us about why we use imdb ratings on our you know Full length shows when we talk about the movies and if they hold up       I know that ratings are sometimes everything for how a movie is perceived And that's not always the case because this is art, right it is Subjective it is very subjective and  it's hard to rate anything But I wanted to talk about imdb versus rotten tomatoes How you could use them because there is so much content right now in this world  You could you know, you don't want to waste your time going into watching something That's a complete dud or if it's terrible and  how do you know that going into it?

Other than kind of looking at these ratings as a guide  to kyle's point You There's certain movies that you i've already locked in your head i'm gonna watch that i'm gonna watch it even if it's shit You're gonna watch it and  I get that but I do kind of use some of these ratings sometimes if I am interested in a movie, but I haven't completely   Locked myself into going to see it yet  and it's in movies or what 14 hours now Yeah, you gotta take time off work to go see You have to watch the ones that came before it too.

Yeah, and the ones that are gonna happen You have to watch tv shows sequestering the books It seems like, , if a movie is under three hours, it's, it's wrong. Frowned upon. Yeah. There's just, it's so hard to fill up that kind of screen time with stuff that you want to watch. Yeah. Sometimes it works.

Like, I mean, I could have sat through six hours of Dune if I'm being honest, but like, you know, uh,  there, there's some, like the Batman was so fucking long. So long. I was like. We're not even going to get into that. You could have shaved off 45 minutes there.  I mean, even Oppenheimer was like, I thought that was Bert verging on.

Too long of a movie.  It was a good movie But when we saw that andrew like I was just kind of like wasn't it three and a half hours? It was like three hours fucking long.  I didn't mind oppenheimer. Honestly, I was pretty into it. But like the irishman That's another one that that one. I think I think oppenheimer is three I think irishman is like three and a half almost 340.

That was way too long So sorry these into two different movies and you can build hype up if you do it, right? but , it's not being done like that,  it's becoming like , a sport, how much can you sit through in some of these movies, and I think that like, when it comes down to like the duration of these movies, and where it's kind of leading, like, you need to be a little bit more in tune with what you're watching, cause you don't wanna fucking sit through a 3 hour movie if you're waiting for something good to happen, why not just look at what somebody else has said about it.

And make your decision from that. I understand that to a degree, to a degree. Three hours is a big investment. I think two and a half hours is a big investment of my time. So it's like, if I'm going to go in and, I mean, Megapolis. Huge disaster, , from critics and audiences alike. And that was about three hours, I think.

So do you want to go waste three hours of your life and be upset? And be further, uh, Like in the whole because you're going to spend time thinking about how terrible that movie was. No, you don't want to do that So andrew, I want you to start us off. So talk about imdb. How did those ratings come about? So it all comes from  viewers.

, it's pretty much from anyone I'm, pretty sure that critics can log in and give it's anybody it's anyone as long as you have an imdb account You can give a you know a rating one out of ten 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10 being the best, obviously. And it's just an average of all of those ratings for whoever gives them.

 Pretty straightforward. Yeah, , it's very straightforward. It is, is literally like other movie lovers telling you what they think and they're compiling that score. Now I will say you can only give a whole number rating. You can't give like a 7. 5. It can only be a seven, an eight, so on and so forth.

The numbers that you do see. Is the average so it could be a decimal it could be 7. 3. It could be 8. 1 Sometimes it will land on an even you know eight or a whole number, but most times  a it's a decimal, right? And you'll notice that like imdb scores are sometimes a lot lower than what you expect in your head, too Yeah, and it's because audiences are usually the harder critics the actual critics themselves  critics will  grouped together like birds of a feather and  they will probably rate the Stuff that they feel high class about even if it's good or bad and they'll rate it high And again, we talked about Horror being a low brow form.

I mean critics always hate on it like critics and even even Audience, , viewers, they do as well. It's very, very critical. Well, because it makes people uncomfortable, and anything that's actually worthwhile looking at in, sidebar, in, , And a lot of these horror movies are like, you're going to have to watch some gritty shit to get there.

And a lot of people don't have the stomach for that. Yeah, and . I do think horror is super, super subjective. Where, , most people understand a drama when they see it. Most people see a comedy, or understand a comedy when they see it. , Andrew loves paranormal horror a lot.

I'm not a big fan. It doesn't really do much for me. But that that could lead to different ratings from two different people  Whereas a comedy again, it's pretty straightforward Everyone's going to be even if you don't have the same sense of humor if it is funny enough and you chuckle at it You know, you're going to get a laugh.

I think horror is  , one end of the spectrum and people also like to like puff out their chest and be like, Oh, that didn't scare me at all. Yeah. And so they rate things that way. Yeah. It wasn't a jump scare. It didn't make me do this or that. Like it wasn't, I'm going to rate this lower now because I  want to feel a certain way about this particular thing.

And there's a difference everybody between being startled and actually being scared. But anyway, I digress. , let's talk about rotten tomatoes. So rotten tomatoes.  Is compiled into two different scores , it's critic scores and audience scores So  that's  different from imdb where they lump it all together in imdb  Rotten tomatoes really takes critic scores into consideration and that's where you get the certified fresh or the certified rotten  cute little sticker on a movie.

Are they?  Averaging the critic and audience score to get the the tomato score They're averaging the critics together  it's not out of the realm of possibility to see a certified fresh audience score and then see it's having a couple times Certified, right?

Yeah. I mean there's a lot of movies that audiences love that critics hate it. Andrew look up  Ghostbusters, look up Afterlife. do this on Rotten Tomatoes? On Rotten Tomatoes. What they do is they take favorable reviews.

In rotten tomatoes and they build out a percentage, right? Yeah, so it says 90  on rotten tomatoes that means critics are 90 favorable. That doesn't mean that critics rated this movie nine out of ten A favorable review for you. Kyle.  If it's a binary choice favorable or not favorable  That that's kind of misleading, right?

Like the choices are one or the other it's not like oh I thought it was this amount of good. It's Was it good or was it bad? Was it good? Cool. And then 90 percent of people, 90 people out of 100 go, it was good. 10 critics may be like, it was, it was watchable. Which, I mean, that sounds like a 10, but you get a 90 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.

So Rotten Tomatoes should just be used as a score of, is it favorable? And there's a 90 percent chance that you'll like the movie at least.  That's kind of how Rotten Tomatoes builds out. So for Ghostbusters Afterlife, we have the tomato meter, which is the critics, and that is at 64%.

Okay. Whereas the popcorn meter, which is audience, is 94%. And that's exactly where I'm coming through, is nine out of ten people from the audience said, yeah, I'd watch that again, and six out of ten critics said that they would watch it again, or liked it, you know, vice versa.  In critics world with rotten tomatoes, there's no Middle ground, right?

It's like you either liked it or you didn't and while we're at it. Why don't we? Throw the IMDB rating in for yeah, Ghostbusters afterlife It is an even seven point zero out of ten and that is so interesting because you know I wouldn't I classify that movie is very okay And I think seven is on the cusp of okay  You know, we've given movies that we really like a seven.

Yeah. Yeah. But I, I think there's a stark difference between  a 7. 3 and just a seven. Cause to me, a seven is like 6. 8, 6. 9. Those are pretty much even in my eyes. So I look at any movie as five is right down the middle. One is bad.  10 is perfect, which you'll never get a 10 for me. But no, , five is right down the middle.

So five would be meh. Five is the worst to me. See I I would five five is just bad. Yeah, it's not it's not good I don't i'm trying to think of something that would like fall into that that I could just Right down the middle , that's the worst type of movie  and tyler if he's listening  that's what he talks about all the time is like I'd rather you be really bad because that can be entertaining in itself And I'd rather you obviously be really good because that's entertaining.

But when you're just right down the middle It's really hard to find anything. Yeah, and so five to me is right down the middle and six is kind of like Decent and then sevens where you get into this is good  This is something I will watch again, is The Seven Territory. This is rewatchable. Anything underneath a seven is not going to be a rewatch value that's very high.

Six is those movies like, yeah, I know it's coming, I get it. Or it's just like the performances aren't that great. Five is not a well thought out movie. Poorly directed, not great acting, or a combination of many things. I think a good five movie would be The Happening  With Mark Wahlberg, the M. I. Shyamalan movie with Mark Wahlberg.

Probably is in the fives. It's it's it's gonna be that's gonna be like right down the middle like I would watch that again in another decade to remind myself Of what it is versus Indiana Jones  Any of, any of the first three, which I would watch. It's a three, isn't it? The Happening is a, is an even five.

It's 5. 0 out of 10. Can we just tell everybody how good, can we just say how good I am really quickly? You're really good. I'm really good. So bad. It's not a great movie, but it is something that you'd want to revisit in like 10 years. Just be like, I want to remember how bad that is. Like, I can get something out of this.

You know, anything like Indiana Jones, any of the first three movies, I can rewatch those anytime a year. You know what I mean? Star Wars. I can watch those any time of the year. Lord of the Rings. Watch that any time of the year. Rush Hour. I can watch that any time of the year. You know? Like, these are all super bad.

I can go on and like, these are all movies that are going to be above a 7. For sure. So I think for me, 7 is the kind of threshold where We dip into how often am I going to watch this movie versus recommend this to somebody else. And I think that's  why we do the show that we do. I think we're going to ask when we have some, , we're going to have some guests on, you know, spoiler alert.

Spoiler alert. So when we get Derek on too, , I want to see how he feels about it because as someone who makes films. You know for a living it's how do you feel when your film gets put into  that subjective landscape, you know Where people are judging it based on a number score as opposed to you know, did they like it or not?

Well, derek's a great director. He doesn't have to fucking worry about that. Everything's a 9. 0   I do feel like once I learned that from rotten tomatoes It made kind of looking at rotten tomatoes a little easier  half the time I know if I'm gonna watch it or not without even looking at ratings Usually I'm the same way, but  if I found a movie out there that might oh, it looks interesting I will head over to usually I use Letterboxd, but in this case, sometimes I'll look at Rotten Tomatoes.

You're fancy I'm fancy. You're a hipster. I will look at Rotten Tomatoes and see Where the percentages lie and if there is a huge deviation from audience to critics just like that I'll probably end up watching it just to see Why there is a difference because critics are good. They're cool. They help sometimes but , the lens that's going to be looked through is I'm getting paid usually to make this a highly formed opinion that, you know, I have an art degree or an English degree , and being able to separate and talk about these themes and, and that is good.

That is needed for sure. There's a lot of pretension though that people don't, that we don't need that. And we live in a time right now where pretentiousness is not really in style. Like it's just ,  that's not really helpful.  Bridging the gap between everyday people   is kind of like where people are landing at now and I think that critics  Still very much need to be a part of the conversation, but it's good to know That a lot of these you know Critic scores are they're going to be looking at things a lot differently than you or I would be looking at them You know, like I didn't go to film school.

 We went to school At an art school To get our degrees in theater,  you know, what was yours musical theater bfa? No, I was just acting acting. Like we get we understand a lot of the basics but these critics are going to be getting into things that like are a little bit above they're so Philosophical and some of them just like love to hear themselves a lot of it.

It's also being honest Yes, it's it's a lot of that and a lot of these a lot of these people that like to hear themselves talk at a certain point  Are also people in the film world that are talking about like well You don't understand the shot that they made with this lens and like at this distance and like and the lighting There's no connection with them in the average human.

Not really. I wouldn't say there's none, but there's  That connection has been fractured people know what they like too And it's it's entertainment at the end of the day A lot of people are watching film and tv shows to log off or enjoy and getting grossed in this story that you're telling them And if it hits with them it hits with them You It could be a movie that sucks or somebody could out the out there want to like give the happening a nine That they just absolutely enjoyed it and i'm sure there probably is someone who has that person's just watching movies the rest of their life Because they're not going to be invited to any party or social gathering not one that i'm hosting.

No, they probably don't drive Probably a vegetarian Who loves the trees? Shut up  So I  I want to play a quick game. So i'm going to give you a movie You And I want to see if you can guess the Rotten Tomato Critic score and guess the Rotten Tomato audience. Oh, I'm gonna be bad at this because I never use Rotten Tomatoes.

Yeah, all right. You ready? Yeah, let's do it. All right, , Inception.  Inception. Inception? Andrew. Okay, so I'm gonna say, The popcorn meter, which is audience is like 95 percent plus. So it could be anywhere from like 95 to a hundred. And I bet the tomato meter, the critic score is like  70, 77 percent or something like that.

75 percent somewhere in that range. That's my guess on that.  , I know that people love that movie. So I'm going to say like around 90 to 93%, 90 to 93 percent for the people. Um, and then for the critics, I'm going to say probably like,  I'm going to say 80,  81%.  So critics said 87%. Oh, Dan, that's high.

And then audience was 91%. Damn. 91. 91. So 91 percent for Inception, but 94 percent Ghostbusters Afterlife. Yeah, interesting. All right. Well, one's a little more heady than the other, you know, it's pretty simple. So I bet the  IMDB is like 8. 8 or something like that or like 8. 9 something like that.

 What about the empire strikes back kyle?   Empire strikes back people fucking love that movie  , it's better than the first.

So I'm going to say  audience score around 95 percent critic score.  I think that's going to be high too. I think that's going to probably going to be like 80, 86%. Okay.  Yeah.   I don't want to deviate too much because I don't want to just be a contrarian. I agree with him I would say 90, 96 percent popcorn meter and then we'll say 89 percent for a tomato meter  95 percent on critic score and then it was 97%.

So yeah, everybody ubiquitously loved. So now we went low on that. We're gonna start getting into some, we're gonna deviate. Those are two  Some of the best movies of all time. Yeah.  I'm throwing you guys a huge curve ball with this one. What about Robocop two?  Oh, robo 2, 2 2. Oh, this is gonna be audience score. I'm gonna say was probably like a 76. I'm gonna say 68 to 70%. 

And then the critic scores could be like,  probably like 20 to 30%, somewhere in there. Okay. I can't, I, I can't get into specifics. I've never seen it before. I'll, I'll say audience scores like.  70. I'm just gonna go like 75% and I'll say that's popcorn. Popcorn meter, tomato meter critics, I'll say 43%  critic

I'll start with the audience score. The audience scored is 37%. Okay. Damn. Shit. People didn't like this movie. Um, and  and the critic score is 28%.  Okay. So I could have gone down a few notches for each. We were both a little.  A little, a little off. Um, so now we're going to go to the next one, Fox and the Hound.

Ooh,  interesting. That's a really old movie. This is one of my favorite Disney movies of all very sad movie. Very sad, very heavy. But it doesn't matter what you think. It doesn't.  Um, okay, so we'll start with Popcorn Meter.  I'm gonna say 81 percent and then I'll say  Tomato meter critic score. 

I'll say like 77 I don't know. I'm pansing out here. But  Kyle, what do you think? This is such a I mean, I don't I don't even fucking know. It's a good kid It's a car to me but like cartoon the media doesn't have as much to do with it I don't think as the fucking like The story the overall feeling that you get after you watch.

I mean, it's a set. It's a it's heavy. It's a good movie though Yeah, so I'm gonna say Fuck me. I don't even know like critics score. I mean cuz it's pretty straightforward. You kind of see what's coming So critics score price 60 something percent and I'm gonna say audience score like  audience score 88 to 90 percent so Critic score 75 percent Audience score 78.

Okay, cool. So I was yeah, very I was very worth close. Yeah threading the needle Here's a good one from 2008. Everyone remembers this classic. I picked this one out for a reason  a disaster movie  Oh It is like when they're making all those spoof movies like a superhero movie Yeah, but this was like a turd, you know, like the scary movies Oh, yeah.

Okay. So this is when they were starting to get egregious and not funny, , and kind of dumb. I'll say, um,  I'll say like, uh, tomato meter critics is like,  In , the teens, like low teens, like 12%. 12%. And then I'll say tomato meter is like 20%, maybe not even. Yeah, I'm gonna say audience is like 35% and the critics is gonna be like maybe 8%.

8%. So the audience score is 21%. So Andrew, you're right on on that one. Fuck. And the tomato meter.  One percent.  Holy shit. So take, take ten percentage points off of what I said. Yeah. So, um, that, that kind of gives you like a rundown of different movies. I know we. Who was in that movie? I can't even remember.

It doesn't matter. Yeah. I mean, one percent. Carmen Electra was in that. Of course she was. She's in a lot of those. , to wrap it up, you use ratings however you want to use it. Don't let anyone tell you to not use them. Don't let anybody tell you to go all in on a rating either. That doesn't mean anything.

If you want to watch something or have a strict opinion, Opinion on something, you know, you have that opinion. You love watching it. Any final thoughts Kyle? Yeah, you live in your own fucking world Nobody else knows what's going on like what you like and don't fucking worry about what other people tell you to like unless it's us And you should always listen to what we tell you because our subjective reality is also yours  so, we hope that you rate this show high. We're 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 100 percent in the audience.

Score, I think the first eight. Podcast to ever do that. , continue to add to our ratings unless you're gonna rate us bad then don't do that Please don't yeah, please don't i'll cry  And we'll see you next time