[tmoertel]

Along the lines you suggest, a while ago I took IMDB's ratings and used their emperical cumulative distribution function to "flatten" them into something more useful, percentile scores:

http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2006-01-17-mining-gold-from-th...

This was about a decade ago, so I'd expect the resulting decoder ring to be somewhat miscalibrated for today's movie ratings. But the same process would be straightforward to apply to a more up-to-date data set of ratings.