movie-ratings on S Anand

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I always wondered why old movies are rated so high on IMDb.

For example, 12 Angry Men (1954) with just ~900K votes ranks about as high as Inception (2010) with ~2M votes. Few people I know have seen 12 Angry Men. So where does this high rating come from?

My theories were:

Old movies really are that good.
IMDb’s algorithm is biased towards old movies.
People remember older movies fondly.

Actually, it’s none of these. It’s selection bias.

Few people watch a 1950s black & white drama: cinephiles, film students, etc. They love it and give it 9s and 10s.

Everyone watched Inception. The casual majority thinks it’s fine, not life changing. Maybe a 7 or 8.

This creates a paradox: obscurity protects ratings while popularity is its own punishment. Only “devotees” watch obscure movies - leading to better ratings than widely seen movies.

PS: This data analysis and story were authored by Claude Code. That includes the statistical significance validation.

Story: https://sanand0.github.io/datastories/imdb-democracy-penalty/index.html Prompt: http://github.com/sanand0/datastories/tree/main/imdb-democracy-penalty Code: https://github.com/sanand0/imdbscrape/pull/1

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 04:49:51 +0000

Snow White (2025) is an outlier on the IMDb. With a rating of 1.8 and ~362K votes, it’s one of the most popularly trashed movies.

Prior to Snow White the frontier of popular bad movies was held by the likes of Radhe, Batman & Robin, Fifty Shades of Gray, etc. Snow White sets a new records.

Snow White (IMDb): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6208148/
IMDb explorer: https://sanand0.github.io/imdb/

Visualising the IMDb

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 20:42:18 +0000

The IMDb Top 250, as a source of movies, dries out quickly. In my case, I’ve seen about 175/250. Not sure how much I want to see the rest.

When chatting with Col Needham (who’s working his way through every movie with over 40,000 votes), I came up with this as a useful way of finding what movies to watch next.

Each box is one or more movies. Darker boxes mean more movies. Those on the right have more votes. Those on top have a better rating. The ones I’ve seen are green, the rest are red. (I’ve seen more movies than that – just haven’t marked them green yet :-)

I think people like to watch the movies on the top right – that popularity compensates (at least partly) for rating, and the number of votes is an indication of popularity.

For example, my movie pattern tells me that I ought to see Cidade de Deus, Inglourious Basterds and Heat – which I knew from the IMDb Top 250, but also that I ought to cover Kick-Ass, The Hangover and Juno.

It’s easy to pick movies in a specific genre as well.

Clearly, there are many more Comedy movies in the list than any other type – though Romance and Action are doing fine too. And I seem the have a strong preference for the Fantasy genre, in stark contrast to Horror.

(Incidentally, I’ve given up trying to see The Shining after three attempts. Stephen King’s scary enough. The novel kept me awake checking under my bed for a week at night. Then there’s Stanley Kubrick’s style. A Clockwork Orange was disturbing enough, but Haley Joel Osment in the first part of A.I. was downright scary. Finally, there’s Jack Nicholson. Sorry, but I won’t risk that combination on a bright sunny day with the doors open.)

You can track your list at http://250.s-anand.net/visual.

For those who want to play with the code, it’s at http://code.google.com/p/two-fifty/source/browse/trunk/visual.html.

Comments

Umar Sharief 11 Dec 2011 7:40 am: Great Idea… would have been much more awesome if we were able to select multiple Genres ..
Thejesh GN 7 Jul 2011 7:19 am: Love it.
Recommended Movies | Brian Hurley's Blog 26 Dec 2012 10:34 pm (pingback): […] is another way to find good movies to watch you might have missed, and the link for the visualization […]

Popular lousy movies

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 12:00:00 +0000

If you plot all movies by their number-of-votes on IMDb and their rating on IMDb, you get the chart below. Movies with more votes usually have a higher rating.

I was interested two things:

Which are the unpopular, but good (highly-rated), movies?
Which are the popular, but lousy, movies?

The answer to the first question is: there are no unpopular good movies. The cluster of dots on the top-left (in red) are not movies – they’re TV shows (Band of Brothers, Pride and Prejudice, Arrested Development).

The answer to the second is: there are 9 really popular lousy movies.

It’s interesting that every single one of these had a huge budget. (Perhaps this is understandable: more people would see a big-budget film and vote on it.)

Comments

Michelle 5 Dec 2006 12:37 pm: Hey! Do you have about top 100 anything? Except for movies?

Netflix prize

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Netflix has released a sample of its customers’ movie ratings at Netflix Prize. You can download these (700 MB), create an algorithm that rates the training data, run it against the test data, and see if you can get better ratings than their algorithm. If you do, you win $1 million. (Chris Anderson explains why.)

IMDB Top 250 outliers

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 12:00:00 +0000

On the IMDb top 250, you normally see a correlation between the number of votes and the rating for a movie. Better rated movies are more watched. The outliers are interesting.

The movies that are popular despite not having a high rating are:

I can understand why The Sixth Sense, Pirates of the Caribbean and especially The Matrix are on this list – geeks would have watched these and voted on IMDb, though their voting need not have been high. But why are Gladiator and Sixth Sense on that list?

Movies that are highly rated, but not as popular are:

Seven Samurai and The Good, The Bad, The Ugly probably didn’t get the votes they deserve because they’re written in their Japanese and Mexican names on IMDb. I hadn’t seen them for a long time for the same reason. As for The Godfather, I personally think it’s just overrated. But Rear Window? That’s a surprise. Hitchcock thriller with all the classic elements…

Another correlation is between the rating and the year of the movie. Early movies get lower ratings than recent movies. Technique could be the reason, but I doubt it. In any case, some movies stand out of their time.

I haven’t seen Metropolis or M. But among the others, I think Citizen Kane is the one that deserves to stand out, if only for portraying the anti-hero, and for not having a happy ending. The Shawshank Redemption was a bit of a surprise. Few people that I know have heard of it. And yet, there it is, right on top.

Comments

Madhu 4 Apr 2006 10:56 am: Some analysis this:) were u consulting for IMDB sometime?:)
S Anand 4 Apr 2006 12:22 pm: Nah, just had some time on my hands early this morning!
ritzkini 4 Apr 2006 2:29 pm: :D cool anal ! but..how did you get the raw data ?? is my question !
S Anand 4 Apr 2006 3:53 pm: Just cut and paste data on the IMDb top 250 page on Excel!
Shankar 5 Apr 2006 3:24 am: Another conclusion one could draw: The conclusion that a movie is good seems representative of public opinion due to the high number of votes, but that a movie is bad is only the conclusion of a few, and hence may not be representative of public opinion. Is this a correct conclusion?
S Anand 5 Apr 2006 6:04 am: I wouldn’t say that from this data. These represent the top rated movies on IMDb, i.e. the top 250 movies EVER. We can only say that high ratings are contributed by both large and small samples. Even that would be a weak statement because IMDb has a “minimum number of votes” cutoff for the top 250.
Govar 17 Jan 2007 6:30 pm: Another interesting thing I’ve noticed in IMDB ratings is that a lot of votes are meant either to push up or pull down. For example, almost every movie will have more number of people rating 1 than ratings 2,3 or 4. Which coudl mean only one thing: They want to bring down the rating. Similarly, lot of people go to the other extreme - 10 - instead of say 8 or 9.
S Anand 17 Jan 2007 7:40 pm: That’s an interesting observation… did you get that out of the raw IMDb data? I’ll have a look at that. Should be interesting analysis to do.
fdf 24 Apr 2007 1:04 pm: imdb top 250 is not good, don;t listen to it, pp;l vote up a film, and vote films down! godgather and LOTR is over rated!

movie-ratings on S Anand

Visualising the IMDb

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Most popular movies on IMDb

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Popular lousy movies

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Netflix prize

IMDB Top 250 outliers

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