Don’t let film websites make a Muppet of you

Ghostbusters has been scoring around 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, much lower than the critics' 73% score. Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for Sony Pictures

Independence Day: Resurgence was this summer's dead-on-arrival blockbuster – Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw called it "planet-smashingly boring" in his one-star review. Massively popular film review website Rotten Tomatoes (it has 22 million users) scored it at just 35%, with critics and audiences alike dismissing it as a dull, brainless sequel. Over on IMDB the user reviews were of the "Wow, I can't believe I paid $8 for that trash" variety. I always check both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB before heading to a cinema (or for new releases on Netflix), so was thankful to see the scores – it saved me a tenner and a wasted couple of hours. A few weeks ago similar reviews stopped me wasting another tenner, this time on the Ghostbusters reboot. But was I being seriously misled? What Ghostbusters reveals is how, in the words of one movie blogger, the internet review system is broken.

In the past, films relied on good reviews plus word-of-mouth. Today RT and IMDB have digitally replaced word-of-mouth and become hugely influential consumer websites as a result. So it matters enormously that what they tell you is fair.

So what do we learn from Ghostbusters? When I first scanned Rotten Tomatoes for the film, my eye immediately dropping to the top right hand audience score, I was instantly put off. At the time it was showing something around 50% liking it, or much lower than the 73% critic score. The wisdom of the crowd was telling me Ghostbusters was a turkey, no matter what the critics thought.

But dig deeper and you find that the "crowd" is loud, often angry, men. And the maths behind the percentage ratings is interesting, to say the least.

Take these early audience reviews on RT: "Non-funny, man hating" … "Jokes about men, wasn't exactly funny" … "garbage third wave feminism". No surprise, all these were written and posted on the site by men. Each gave the film half or one star. "Ton of fun" … "Incredibly enjoyable" … "seeing it for third time tomorrow". All these four and five-star reviews were written and posted by women.

So what, you might argue. Some films will always appeal more to women than men. Except that the great majority of reviewers who bother to voice their views on websites are men. So that "audience score" you see on every film is really telling you what men like, rather than women. Search on IMDB and you find the data breakdown for reviews. Ghostbusters scores an average 5.3 out of 10. But for women the average score was 8.1, compared with 4.6 for men. But men's scores matter more, because 22,500 men wrote up reviews on IMDB, compared with 7,500 women.

Now let's look at how the percentage is calculated on RT. I had assumed an 85% or 90% score on the site's "Tomatometer" meant most critics were giving the film rave reviews. Get 96% and the film must be almost perfect. But you know what gets 96% on RT? The 2011 Muppets movie. That's the same score on RT managed by Psycho, recognised by the Guardian as the number one horror film of all time, and some way ahead of Brief Encounter, which we described as the greatest romance movie of all time, but which gets just 89% on RT.

What happens on RT is that the Tomatometer is just the percentage of professional reviews that are positive. If every critic gives the Muppets a score of 60% or more, then theoretically it scores 100. Which is what nearly happened – the Muppets had 209 professional reviews, of which 200 were three stars or above. So that adds up to a 96% score on the Tomatometer.

I shall carry on using RT and IMDB. They remain fantastically useful sites to consult before spending time and money at the cinema. But I will probably go and see Ghostbusters now, despite what RT told me. And I bet it's a lot better than the Muppets.

Source: Don't let film websites make a Muppet of you