Interesting, because I've found imdb ratings to be the best because it's based on user votes.
Movie critics, on the other hand, seem to vote the complete opposite of regular viewers (and each other) to set themselves apart. Or voting some awful art house movie a 10/10 to signal that they, too, understood the high brow nuances that the groundlings could not. I end up agreeing with the user votes far more often than the critic scores on RT and Metacritic, and the user scores tend to line up with imdb anyways.
IMO IMDB has a big problem with recency. #3 in their top movies list is The Dark Knight, which is frankly absurd (it's a great movie, but #3 of all time? Come on)
> Or voting some awful art house movie a 10/10 to signal that they, too, understood the high brow nuances that the groundlings could not.
I think this just speaks to a divide in movie reviews. Those critics are reviewing the movies as art, whereas many user reviews are reviewing movies as a consumer product. Neither approach is incorrect, but they have very different outcomes.
RT has Black Panther as their #1 movie of all time. The fact is, people have learned to inherently train themselves to use certain review websites. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/
My current rules - Anything over an 8 on imbd is a must watch if over a year old. If a comedy/action movie over a 7 is fine. For less than a year old I read reviews, and decide how invested I am in watching it. Fantastic Beasts 2 tanked, but I watched it anyway and enjoyed it.
Similar for me, but more forgiving. Especially for horror which I enjoy but IMDb raters don't seem to the same. In general, anything below a 6 I'll maybe reconsider, or 5 or so for horror.
It's not so much a question of who is correct or incorrect, but rather which will be more relevant to consumers. Probably the "consumer product" reviews. Not always, but for the most part.
Ha. I had the exact same thought. Metacritic has become my go to. It's not as simple as seeing average critic reviews though. If there is a huge disparity between average critic and average user reviews, it tends to be significant (eg critics panning something that's hugely entertaining or fawning over something that's really trash).
But I've pretty much stoped looking at IMDB entirely. One example: what I call the sci-fi fudge factor (SFFF), namely that if something is sci-fi or fantasy (or superheroes come to think of it) it tends to be a full rating point worse than its rating would suggest. Another: there are a lot of things in the 7s where something could be really good or really bad and I'm not sure why.
Most rating systems I have discovered rarely apply to my specific tastes or needs. More and more I follow specific reviewers or, more interestingly, individual review comments. I find one or two short reviews (without spoilers) to show what the reviewers deem important to them, giving their rating more qualitative weight, and therefore I can compare it better to my specific tastes. If I went off the average/median rating alone, I'd never find fresh, unique content.
RT is owned by Warner and Universal. IMDB is owned by Amazon. I find it hard to believe user scores aren’t massaged when required when the parent companies are spending billions on creating movies/TV.
