[foobarqux]

It’s just not true in practice: it’s pretty typical to find films with high rotten tomatoes scores and not very high metacritic scores; rotten tomatoes scores are pretty much useless unless you are not very discerning.

Examples:sovereign, how to make a million…, count of monte cristo, etc

[famouswaffles]

Yes it's just true in practice.

Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are not the same site and have different audiences. Even the most popular movies will barely scrap 60 reviewers on Metacritic.

Comparing them directly is meaningless. Unfortunately they removed the average score for critics percentage but it's still there for the audience percentage.

You're also just wrong. Those movies, especially the last two have high Metacritic scores.

[foobarqux]

> Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are not the same site and have different audiences.

Yes we are talking about aggregating critic reviews. It's true if you like what the mass audience likes you'll be fine with any kind of crude measure like rotten tomatoes (although you'll still be better off with IMDB scores).

> Even the most popular movies will barely scrap 60 reviewers on Metacritic.

If you are talking about critic reviews there really aren't that many movie critics and you don't need that many. If you are talking about user reviews that isn't what the site is geared for (and not what the users of the site want either, just go to IMDB).

> You're also just wrong. Those movies, especially the last two have high Metacritic scores.

75 is not a high metacritic score, not just in absolute terms, but particularly not relative to the (ridiculous) 97% of rotten tomatoes.

If you only want to watch a few movies a year (and presumably want them to be the "best") Metacritic is the only useful site (with the provisos that someone else posted about political films and modulating for your own personal preferences).

[famouswaffles]

>If you are talking about critic reviews there really aren't that many movie critics and you don't need that many.

RT still amasses a few hundred critics, and yes it matters statistically because scores will almost certainly decrease (or at the least be unstable) with more reviews until a statically significant threshold. Below hundred isn't it and a score based on 10 ratings is nigh useless.

>75 is not a high metacritic score, not just in absolute terms, but particularly not relative to the (ridiculous) 97% of rotten tomatoes.

Yes it's a high score. Have you taken a look at what kind of range best picture nominees fall at ? 75 is a high score. We've already established a 97% doesn't mean 9.7/10. Doesn't mean your contrived examples are a reality. I'm sure you can do arithmetic and see what a 3/5 falls to over 10.

[foobarqux]

> RT still amasses a few hundred critics, and yes it matters statistically because scores will almost certainly decrease (or at the least be unstable) with more reviews until a statically significant threshold.

There aren't a hundred critics worth counting, it's just garbage in garbage out; I don't want every-person-with-a-substack's review, I want the dozen or so top film critics.

> Below hundred isn't it and a score based on 10 ratings is nigh useless.

It really isn't. Metacritic top movies for each year are indicative of the "quality" movies, as you would expect the average of the top 10 movie critics to be.

> Yes it's a high score. Have you taken a look at what kind of range best picture nominees fall at ? 75 is a high score.

No, for this year alone (which is only part way through) there are 68 movies with a score above 75 on Metacritic. If you were watching movies according to score alone that mean you would have to watch more than 8 movies a month just to get to those films (and that's if you refuse to watch movies from any other year).

> We've already established a 97% doesn't mean 9.7/10

We've established that the number is not very useful, far less useful than a 9.7/10 type score is.

Look no one is going to stop you from using Rotten Tomatoes if it meets your needs. For me and many other people who don't have time or desire to watch films below a certain quality we need an actual estimate of a quality score, which Rotten Tomatoes doesn't provide and Metacritic does.

[famouswaffles]

>There aren't a hundred critics worth counting, it's just garbage in garbage out; I don't want every-person-with-a-substack's review, I want the dozen or so top film critics.

This is an argument against aggregation itself, not for Metacritic over RT. If you only trust a dozen specific critics, you should just read them directly. The entire purpose of an aggregator is to gather a wide sample to smooth out individual biases. That's the opposite of 'garbage in garbage out'. If your sample isn't wide as an aggregator, that's a minus no matter how you spin it.

>No, for this year alone... there are 68 movies with a score above 75 on Metacritic.

This is a nonsensical argument. By this logic, if we have a phenomenal year for film where 100 movies get a score over 75, the score itself becomes less valid? A score's meaning is relative to the scale, not the number of films that achieve it.

And Literally hundreds of movies are released every year. 8 a month is a tiny fraction of that.

Your personal viewing capacity doesn't change the fact that 75/100 is objectively a high score.

>We've established that the number is not very useful, far less useful than a 9.7/10 type score is.

No, you've asserted that. We've established they measure two different things. RT measures consensus (% of critics who liked it). Metacritic measures average intensity (a weighted average score). Both are useful. One tells you how many critics would recommend it, the other tells you how much they recommend it, on average. Claiming one is "not very useful" is just stating your personal preference as well as demonstrably false, as rotten tomatoes is very widely used.

[foobarqux]

> If you only trust a dozen specific critics, you should just read them directly

It's much quicker and easier to just get an aggregated Metascore, which takes a second (and allows you to go in blind). I don't have any desire to read 12 movie review articles for every movie ever released.

> The entire purpose of an aggregator is to gather a wide sample to smooth out individual biases.

The point is to get a useful number not to achieve some platonic ideal in statistics. Again there aren't 100 movies critics worth listening to and I am not looking for popular opinion. If you want popular opinion use IMDB ratings.

> This is a nonsensical argument. By this logic, if we have a phenomenal year for film where 100 movies get a score over 75, the score itself becomes less valid? A score's meaning is relative to the scale, not the number of films that achieve it.

Yes is some fantasy world where that happens you would be right. In the real world that doesn't happen. Even if it did happen many people still have time constraints and want to watch only the best X films a year and Metacritic is just better at doing that than Rotten Tomatoes is. As yet another example "Bob Trevino likes it" is 94 RT vs 70 MC compared with "Past Lives" 95 RT vs MC 94: Which is more informative when selecting a movie? I can list more examples but I can't find any examples that demonstrate the reverse (i.e. that shows that you would be better off listening to RT over MC).

> And Literally hundreds of movies are released every year. 8 a month is a tiny fraction of that. Your personal viewing capacity doesn't change the fact that 75/100 is objectively a high score.

"High score" is an arbitrary definition. For the purposes of the discussion, which is whether Metacritic is a better way to determine which movies to watch, 74 doesn't cross the threshold of worth watching (absent some other factor) unless you watch more than 8 movies a month (and only want to watch movies released this year).

> No, you've asserted that. We've established they measure two different things. RT measures consensus (% of critics who liked it). Metacritic measures average intensity (a weighted average score). Both are useful. One tells you how many critics would recommend it, the other tells you how much they recommend it, on average. Claiming one is "not very useful" is just stating your personal preference as well as demonstrably false, as rotten tomatoes is very widely used.

Again, it is not useful in the sense of choosing movies to watch if you are even mildly selective. I gave another example above showing why. It's true that many people don't care about that, they just want something that the average person finds entertaining for 1.5 hours, and Rotten Tomatoes is fine for that. If you have a quality threshold higher than that or would rather watch a better movie than a worse one then it isn't.

[kelseydh]

Weirdly I often find films with an RT score in the range of 40% to 60% with high-ish IMDB scores to be the most interesting.

Whereas an RT 90%+ score without IMDB/Metacritic consensus the film is good typically means its mass-produced common denominator Hollywood slop.