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Originally Posted by Severian
Something's wrong with the aggregator if so many movies are getting 90%+. Seriously. I question their statistics.
They posted a "best superhero movies" list a while back, and it boggled my mind. Logan was #1 with a score of, like, 92% and Dark Knight was #2 with a score of 94%. And they were ranking purely by score. I didn't get it, then I realized they were using an "adjusted score" to determine the rank, which, I imagine, creates sort of a z-score for the films, and balances out variables like the amount of time a movie has been out, and adjusts movies with fewer reviews to make them comparable side-by-side to movies with more reviews. Which is REALLT stupid for an "all-time" list, and will almost always guarantee that the most popular movie at the time is at the top.
So Logan had an "adjusted score" of 94.54 or something and Dark Knight had an adjusted score of 94.48 or something, and so the movie with a decade of precedent-setting history, voted the best movie of the millennium by twitter users, that is STILL turning up in reviews of every comic-based movie you read because of how influential it was came in second behind the only Wolverine movie that didn't totally suck nards -- a movie that's 6 months old and is still in its sizzle phase, but didn't win any Oscars and didn't change shit.
Stupid fucking site.
Oh, and they re-published the list after Wonder Woman came out, and guess what? It was #2. Same deal as before. Dark Knight had the highest score of any film in the "genre" and it's in third place. Wonder Woman was good too! But ... come the fuck on RT.
Also, the Room has like 36%, which seems awfully high for the "worst movie ever made." Really. Something's up with that fucking site.
DARK KNIGHT! CHRIS NOLAN! FUCK YOU, BUTTHOLES!
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Being someone who writes (marginally) in the film culture, I can't tell you how much I kinda hate aggregate sites like this and metacritic. Beyond all the "adjustments" you mentioned, sites such as these leave no room for the middlebrow effect. For example, if a publishing site or critic have slight reservations about a film but give it just enough oomph to recommend it, the quota goes into the favorable column. Basically, a 2 1/2 star film on the age-old scale of 1-4 will fall into the favorable column. This doesn't seem like 96% favorable to me, at times.
Think back on the reviews of Ebert and countless other critics who gave films that queasy 2 1/2 star review. Their opinion could teeter either way, giving it a slight edge for cinematography, the auteur theory director push, or some unseen guilty pleasure that they'd make sure and express in eloquent ways. This wasn't always a shining recommendation. Being kind, maybe. Basically, we've lost the most valuable quotient of discussion and rhetoric and replaced it with blurbs.
I know know.... old man kids get off my lawn. I"m done now. If it gets people to see movies, I'm all for it.