Are You Interested In Movie Demographic Stats When It Comes To Ratings

On IMDB, if you click the number of votes right underneath the score, it breaks down the age groups, and genders. It's something I just discovered after 20 years of IMDB membership, and its fascinating.

I'm "new" to this, but if you are aware of this, is there anything you can summarize about the rating habits? Does anything surprise you?

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Not surprising, just the fact there are so many "fake" votes. They can be from the cast and crew, or "fans"/"enemies" of the subject matter/director, etc. It's probably the same at any site that rates movies but IMDb seems to break down the info more. I guess the fact that certain age groups/sexes are more attracted to certain movies can also be interesting except for that stupid fake votes thingy.

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I never noticed that. Very interesting, if accurate.
I do get a kick out of the common disparities between the professional reviewers and the amateur ratings.

People who rated the Snyder Cut 10/10 drive like this, but people who rated the Snyder Cut 9/10 drive like this.*

I'm not saying I haven't given a movie a perfect 10 rating after just a single visit, but I don't believe I've ever hated a movie enough to give something a 1/10. 3/10 maybe. I was looking at the feature the other day and was surprised there is also a spot for the supposed Top 1000 voters average.

What if a movie is just straight up reprehensible, like downright racist or sexist?

Do you rate a movie from the overall feel of it or do you weigh pros and cons?

If it's a movie that has a high chance of an interesting gender opinion divide, I'll click to see more, but I usually rely on the rating itself those times I'm looking at it.

Yeah, that's going to happen a lot, I wonder how much. I look at the breakdown of scores, per point. It depends on the movie - if its very popular but divisive, chances are you'll see a lot of 10s and 1s, but I also look at median score, but also below everything, there is the "Top 1000 IMDB Users" score, as well as US vs. Non-US.


I also wonder about retrospective (changed) votes, say, a movie by Woody Allen, just to make a political statement. Of course, you'll have his fans give him 10s to offset this, or just to support.. It would be interesting to see what % of voters change their scores. I only do it after a subsequent viewing, but it usually doesn't change more than a point.

Overall, everyone has a different preference. At the end of watching ask yourself "Was that a waste of my time or was I entertained?"

Unfortunately, I have a past occupational history with surveys and ratings and surveys like these are about as scientific as forecasting weather based on how much your bunion hurts. They include pretty much every rater bias, have no criteria for ratings and don't have any way of checking the demographics on the responders. Logging in to IMDB is such a pain in the butt with that cryptic id verification thing that the login alone probably causes some potential raters to just mutter f*** this and forget it. I'd need to have an attitude one way or the other to get to the point of actually rating a movie. All of those suggest not much validity for the ratings. Sometimes I just look at them out of curiosity, but they aren't worth much.

You make a good point. I rarely bother to review a movie that I think is a stinker. What's the point? But there are some films that I've had mucho distaste for.

Still, since I've been listening to podcasts of various specialists involved in movie productions, it's softened my negativity towards relatively poor films. To get financing, find a good director, assemble a crew which often is opinionated, to spend all the time and hardship to prepare, film, and post produce a picture-- I've started to see how difficult it is to create a good movie.

Right. As we saw not too long ago, votes can be manipulated.

I have noticed something that pretty well rings true for my tastes. If the pro reviewers and amateur ratings are both high, then it's probably a pretty good film. Conversely if they're both low, then the film is likely not good.

But if the pro reviewers' rating is high, and the amateurs' are low, that generally mean that it's an PC/SJ film, or an art house movie. And I think that the reverse of that is generally true too: the masses like it, but the critics diss it for content.

I don't care for things like age and gender of the fans of a movie, but I think what's important is motivation for the vote. For example, I don't like it when people vote for a movie they have not seen, and just trying to lessen or heighten the vote for alterior reasons.

IMDB is a great source of factual info about movies, but those rankings and demographics are sketchy at best. People who make, promote and advertise movies or profit off them want all that demographic stuff so they can target their ads and product placement. I just can't see that the IMDB crowd, however, is representative of the people that (in normal times), actually pay for tickets and popcorn, the ones that the movie execs want to measure and, as such, represent a skewed set of numbers.

I don't usually pay attention to IMDB's ratings & stats, but I did watch a movie the other day called, Unbelievable!!!!! (2020) and read this rather shocking information in one of the reviews for the movie:

I agree there's going to be some jerks who want to "off-set" the ratings, but with movies with 100,000 ratings, I think it's going to be the most accurate you're going to get... I just looked at a movie I saved on DVR, and I've seen it before, a fine movie, and look on RT (that's the rating Concast uses) and that 57% score was from SIX whole users!

It's probably as close as you will get, but that doesn't mean that it's good information. What we will never see, due to people's desire for privacy (mine included), would be demographic stats from streams and ticket sales. Ratings like Movie Forums or IMDB measure a select population, those who take the trouble to to do a rating or who consider themselves to be some level of expert in the topic. Once you either motivate people with a reward or expect them to go somewhere special to do it, it's a different set of numbers that don't represent the vast majority of movie viewers.

I guess that's why sales are the real bottom line....someone's actually there and pays money, but that doesn't include demographics unless someone gets sneaky. I'd actually love to know whether the industry does get sneaky, like connecting credit card info to identity and demographics. If that does happen, it's probably a very deep secret.

yes.