The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb

538 is using the wrong metrics. For a movie to be truly, truly, <i>sublimely</i> bad, that badness needs to be recognized - people in some cases will want to watch it for its incredible badness. This means that there are going to be a disproportionate number of both 1 and 10 votes. And the winner based on this is - The Room. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368226/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0368226&#x2F;ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt</a>

The opposite effect, a bad movie being rated highly, also occurs. One example of this is with the film &quot;The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure&quot; (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1520498" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt1520498</a>). This film was panned by critics on release and was a complete flop at the box office. Its IMDB rating languished until sometime last year when it began to rise. Around the same time, a bunch of poorly-worded unequivocally positive reviews showed up on the page, all following the same pattern (including one that appears to have been run through a translator and back). The rating made it up to 8.0, although it&#x27;s since fallen to 7.6. If it&#x27;s not the movie&#x27;s production or marketing team involved in this clear manipulation, I don&#x27;t know who it would be, as I can&#x27;t see that this movie has any kind of cult following.

I feel like there&#x27;s an assumption that this data is <i>erroneous</i> for this reason - I think that any reason in which a person gives a negative rating toward a film is valid, be it politically motivated or otherwise.<p>FiveThirtyEight has had a rough start so far so I may be more inclined to seek more nuance than I normally would as they&#x27;ve tended to be extraordinarily simplistic (Silver himself notwithstanding) to date.

I found it odd that the article makes note that 36,000 ratings come from outside the U.S. Maybe I am missing something but wouldn&#x27;t it be expected that many of a Bollywood movie&#x27;s ratings would come from outside the U.S.?

The irony is that they wanted to bury the movie on imdb, but they did such a good job that it is becoming a famous case study.

I would never have heard about this movie if it hadn&#x27;t been so low rated. Perhaps they rather should have given in 5 stars, burying it in mediocrity?

Luckily, IMDB also shows Metacritic ratings next to their own user ratings. I take those into account before I make my decisions on what I&#x27;m going to rent&#x2F;stream.<p>Far too often do you find a movie (usually a somewhat recent release) that&#x27;s just flat out terrible despite having a &gt; 7 score on IMDB (and usually a Metacritic score in the 30&#x27;s or 40&#x27;s)

Troll 2 used to be the worst-rated movie on IMDb until it became a cult favorite and garnered tons of 5-star ratings.<p>If you&#x27;re interested, there&#x27;s a really interesting documentary about Troll 2 called Best Worst Movie, which covers the film&#x27;s production and cult following. After watching the documentary, Troll 2 becomes an enjoyable movie because you know all the crazy backstories to the actors and scenes.

<i>He was sentenced to life in prison for his crimes by the Bangladeshi International Crimes Tribunal. But many Bangladeshis found that sentence too lenient, and more than 100,000 of them gathered in Shahbag Square in the capital city of Dhaka to challenge it.</i><p>It&#x27;s interesting that so many people gathered solely to express &quot;we want this guy dead, not imprisoned.&quot; I wonder if there&#x27;s more context?

Maybe a solution could be weighting the vote according to the user history: a user leaving a single vote on a single movie shouldn&#x27;t be as influential as an user that voted on a wider range of movies over time

<i>Data gone Wrong</i><p>Did they start hanging out with the bad kids, take up cigarettes, drinking, gambling only to progress to crack and burglaries one of which ended with our Data shooting a home owner who returned unexpectedly?<p>I guess I don&#x27;t understand what data is. I always thought it was a set of values. And I always thought that the problem when using data was in the interpretation, and that a prudent consumer of data would always be careful to distinguish between a random sample and self-selecting sample when drawing conclusions, and then would only state conclusions couched in the language of statistical inference.<p>Leaving aside the question of why I should give a fuck about this supposed outrage, why does the author expect there to be a strong correlation between movie quality and the ratings on a website devoted to providing entertainment by having users rate movies?<p>When <i>The Matrix</i> is purported to be better a better movie than <i>Lawrence of Arabia</i>, the problems of interpretation are systemic.

Years ago, when you could download roms from the mame website, I gave a strong up score to the Tron romset.<p>That tipped the romset into the spotlight - there were some leaderboards for highest recent activity and so on. Other people started downloading the romset and voting on it.<p>Suddenly this obscure romset was catapulted into most of the lists for &quot;most active&quot; and &quot;best&quot; etc.<p>I had rated the game honestly. I had fond memories playing the cab for a week on holiday in my youth. But I was surprised that so many other people felt the same, especially on the Mame platform where the game&#x27;s controls made it tricky.<p>All my deliberate attempts at voting shennanigans failed miserably. (Although I haven&#x27;t investigated MTurk or similar yet.)<p>I wish there was a site like Meatball wiki where people could share their vote-weighting methods.

For more information on the war, read the wikipedia article: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_of_1971" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Indo-Pakistani_War_of_1971</a>

The archetypal &#x27;bad&#x27; movie is &quot;Plan 9 from Outer Space&quot; [0], by Ed Wood. It holds that title mainly because of its production values.<p>This one has caused a stir on IMDB for reasons of moral integrity, or bending the truth. Rather odd, since this has been going on in films and similar media for a very long time.<p>&quot;International Gorillay&quot;, a film from Pakistan depicting Salman Rushdie [1]. Coincidentally it was released a year or so after Rushdie&#x27;s &quot;The Satanic Verses&quot; [2]. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini [3] wanted Rushdie dead because of this novel. BTW Iranian films can be very good, like &quot;Where is the Friend&#x27;s Home?&quot; [3].<p>[0] <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0052077&#x2F;</a> [1] <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0251144/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0251144&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Verses" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Satanic_Verses</a> [3] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhollah_Khomeini" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ruhollah_Khomeini</a> [3] <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093342/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0093342&#x2F;</a>

IMDB ratings are bull. Lots of great movies, often even classics, rate around 6 on IMDB because the general public considers them &quot;boring&quot;.<p>The only movies that escape from the IMDB average are a) decent movies that are loved by the masses, b) great movies the masses don&#x27;t watch (being in black and white or not in English alone pretty much guarantees 2 bonus points) and c) movies everyone agrees on are total crap.

Contains the best author disclaimer I&#x27;ve seen:<p><i>Data analysis by Eugene Bialczak. Also, a disclaimer: the author wrote much of the IMDb Trivia App.</i>

It&#x27;s not that the rating is inaccurate... it&#x27;s that a huge population of people that don&#x27;t usually rate movies on IMDB has suddenly entered the rating pool. Maybe the solution is to have country-specific ratings, so that my ratings are averaged with the ratings of my peers, rather than the ratings of people in entirely different cultures.

Any crowdsourced data can be easily manipulated by a well organized or large enough group. See the results of the naming poll for the Megyeri Bridge in Budapest in 2006. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megyeri_Bridge#Naming_poll" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Megyeri_Bridge#Naming_poll</a>

A film I had the pleasure to work on, &quot;Car 54: Where Are You?&quot; has a rating of 2.4, and that was not due to any crowdsourced manipulation; people really hate the movie. I thought it was marginally worse than Police Academy 4, but most people apparently think it really sucks.

if you use imdb as a general indicator of a film&#x27;s quality you&#x27;re much better off entirely excluding the scores of films produced by india and turkey

Very interesting -- a lesson for IMDB to filter votes that fall outside normal distribution ranges.

&quot;hanged to death&quot;? &quot;to apply any new learnings&quot;?

...and 4Chan starts pumping 5 stars into the votes in 4... 3... 2...

&quot;There are currently more than 235,000 films on IMDb, and ... not a single qualified movie besides “Gunday” rates worse than 1.8.&quot;<p>&quot;The next lowest-rated movie on IMDb — 1.8 stars overall ...&quot;<p>I am not sure what the writer means by a &quot;qualified&quot; movie, but this one does rate less than 1.8: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2094870/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt2094870&#x2F;</a><p>It has votes from only 195 users as of this writing, though.

It just needs to be bicameral: one rating from critics and one rating by the public. Rotten Tomatoes does this, and I think it lends for a better overall result.

Justin Beiber&#x27;s Believe now at 1.5, just saying, and I believe that happened more organically. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3165608/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt3165608&#x2F;</a>

I don&#x27;t see how crowdsourcing is hurting here. In fact, I learned something new.<p>I&#x27;m thinking this movie otherwise gets forgotten in the trash bin of bad movies and the data would never tell you anything because it wouldn&#x27;t exist.

Currently working on an approach that would avoid this type of gaming of rankings by changing the way we collect ratings: <a href="https://aeolipyle.co/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aeolipyle.co&#x2F;</a>

I don&#x27;t understand this part: &quot;91 percent of all reviewers gave it one star. The next lowest-rated movie on IMDb — 1.8 stars overall — has a more even distribution of ratings, with only 71 percent of reviewers giving it one star. The evidence suggests the push to down-vote “Gunday” was successful&quot;.<p>To me that&#x27;s just stating the obvious. Of course if there is such a thing as a worst movie then it will have a higher percentage of 1 star votes than other movies. So I don&#x27;t know how that&#x27;s evidence for anything except that the movie seems to be bad.

Any idea where this guy got the data? He mentions rating distributions.<p>I though the majority of IMDB data was not downloadable?

hey, let the data speak for itself! ;)<p>seriously, i do take IMDB ratings into account, but i consider them unreliable at best. Inception, when it came out, was the best movie of all time for a while, according to IMDB users. enough said.

Who would pay attention to ratings from a single unreliable source.<p>For me the best place are meta sites that gather from many related sizes.

Barbra Streisand is in it.

Your powers of observation are simply startling!!!

Bollywood movies are kitsch. Generally they don&#x27;t deserve any rating.