[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.

[famouswaffles]

A movie with 100% on RT will never in practice get an average score of 6/10. This was the original point of contention. Nothing you've said so far has made this statement any less true, nor do you have any examples to refute it.

>It's much quicker and easier to just get an aggregated Metascore... I don't have any desire to read 12 movie review articles

So your argument against a broad-sample aggregator (RT) is to use a slightly-less-broad-sample aggregator (MC)? You complain about "every-person-with-a-substack" but you're still relying on an aggregation of dozens of critics you've never heard of. You're just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and calling it "quality."

>"High score" is an arbitrary definition. For the purposes of the discussion... 74 doesn't cross the threshold of worth watching

You're confusing your personal, subjective viewing threshold with an objective measure of quality. A score is what it is. 75/100 is the top quartile. That is, by definition, a high score. Whether you have enough time in your life to watch every movie in the top quartile is completely irrelevant to the validity of the score itself.

Now this is more besides the point but i really do think that you're using a tool (Metacritic's average score) for a job it wasn't designed for: being the sole arbiter of what's worth your time. A film's "quality" is not a single, objective number. It depends on genre, intent, and audience.

Is a 95-rated historical epic 'better' than the 'best' horror film of the year that only managed an 82 on Metacritic? Your system says yes, which is absurd. They're trying to do different things.

Not to mention your method is overly biased towards one specific type of film: the prestige drama. If that's the only kind of film you like to watch then cool i guess, but if not then what you're currently doing is nonsensical.

>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).

Even the most well received movies have a few mixed, negative or less positive than the consensus reviews. You could well be one of them. So the RT score tries to answers the question..."What are the odds i'll like this movie?"

This is a very useful information to have especially because i'm not a zombie picking movies to watch because of a single average score from an echo chamber of critics (which is bizarrely what you seem to be doing).

If the synopsis of Bob Trevino is more interesting to me, I would absolutely pick it over Past Lives especially if the latter seems more divisive.

They are complementary scores. Only when two movies seem to be the same type of film with the same type of distribution of scores will i favor the average score.

[foobarqux]

> This was the original point of contention...

The original point of contention was that the "percent that approve" of the film that RT uses is surprising and not as useful as a regular rating system. (By the way the average score is now hidden on RT).

> So your argument against a broad-sample aggregator (RT) is to use a slightly-less-broad-sample aggregator (MC)?

My argument is to use useful aggregation of experts instead of a much less useful one.

> You complain about "every-person-with-a-substack" but you're still relying on an aggregation of dozens of critics you've never heard of.

I don't need to have "heard of them" to know that the NYT film critic, the reviewer at Siskel and Ebert and the film critic at Vanity Fair are probably more worth listening to than the "MacGuffin or Meaning Substack".

> You're just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and calling it "quality."

No, the opinions of the film critics for the top publications in the world are not arbitrary.

> You're confusing your personal, subjective viewing threshold with an objective measure of quality. A score is what it is. 75/100 is the top quartile. That is, by definition, a high score. Whether you have enough time in your life to watch every movie in the top quartile is completely irrelevant to the validity of the score itself.

Beside the fact that the rating isn't the percentile ranking of film the entire point of the discussion is which site better helps you choose films. Again the definition of "high score" is completely arbitrary and irrelevant.

> Now this is more besides the point but i really do think that you're using a tool (Metacritic's average score) for a job it wasn't designed for: being the sole arbiter of what's worth your time. A film's "quality" is not a single, objective number. It depends on genre, intent, and audience.

I never said that. It's a helpful filtering mechanism. I watch low rated films if they are a genre I particularly like (just like I eat junk food without claiming that it is haute-cuisine) and I don't watch movies if they are not in a style I enjoy. Apropos of your example I don't like horror so I don't watch it, irrespective of the score.

> Not to mention your method is overly biased towards one specific type of film: the prestige drama. If that's the only kind of film you like to watch then cool i guess, but if not then what you're currently doing is nonsensical.

Most films are dramas as far as I know. In any case you can filter on categories so it's irrelevant.

> The RT score tries to answers the question..."What are the odds i'll like this movie?".

Well it's closer to what are the odds the average person will like it, which isn't what I want: I want 1. to be able to pick a better movie rather than a worse one and 2. be able to threshold on higher quality than the average person.

> This is a very useful information to have especially because i'm not a zombie picking movies to watch because of a single average score from an echo chamber of critics (which is bizarrely what you seem to be doing).

No one is doing this, they are using Metacritic as a starting point to filter and rank movies which, once again, RT doesn't do a good job at because of it's binary classifier system and inclusion of everyone under the sun.

> If the synopsis of Bob Trevino is more interesting to me, I would absolutely pick it over Past Lives. They are complementary scores.

That's fine and as I said something I and everyone else does, just like I eat junk food (and maybe sometimes actually prefer to some 3-star Michelin restaurant). The problem is pretending that those two films are roughly the same quality, or that because someone sometimes prefers a lower critic ranked movie that ratings don't matter: you can make the same argument about preferring a "rotten" RT movie.