Fandango movie ratings

Which site do you use for movie ratings? How much do you trust the ratings? Walt Hicker took this question seriously and investigated the difference between Fandango ratings and other major platforms.

Motivation

How often do you look at movie ratings before deciding to a movie? Which sites do you use? Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, and Metacritic have been the most popular platforms for movie ratings for a long time, with Letterboxd now as an up-and-coming competitor. But rarely if ever, we see people place a lot of trust on Fandango ratings. Why? FiveThirtyEight writer Walt Hicker took notice of the difference between Fandango ratings and other platforms’ ratings and scraped raw data from Fandango to figure out why.

Hicker finds that, by scraping the raw HTML script from Fandango website, Fandango presents a rounded rating but the raw average is in the HTML source code. This results in roughly 40% of the movies in sample were rounded up 0.3 to even a full half-star from the user ratings. It is unclear why Fandango does this, whether this is a designed rounding strategy or merely a bug, but this finding further proves how unreliable Fandango ratings are.

Data

The dataset contains every film that has a Rotten Tomatoes rating, a RT User rating, a Metacritic score, a Metacritic User score, and IMDb score, and at least 30 fan reviews on Fandango that had a sale in 2015. The data from Fandango was pulled on Aug. 24, 2015.

Data preview

fandango_score_comparison.csv

Variable descriptions

Variable	Description
Film	Film name and release year
RottenTomatoes	The Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (critic review) score for the film (percentage of critic reviews that are positive)
RottenTomatoes_User	The Rotten Tomatoes user score for the film (percentage of user reviews that are 3.5 stars or higher)
Metacritic	The Metacritic critic score for the film (100 point scale)
Metacritic_User	The Metacritic user score for the film (0-10 point scale)
IMDB	The IMDb user score for the film (1-10 star scale)
Fandango_Stars	The number of stars the film had on its Fandango movie page
Fandango_Ratingvalue	The Fandango ratingValue for the film, as pulled from the HTML of each page. This is the actual average score the movie obtained.
RT_norm	The Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score for the film, normalized to a 0 to 5 point system
RT_user_norm	The Rotten Tomatoes user score for the film, normalized to a 0 to 5 point system
Metacritic_norm	The Metacritic critic score for the film, normalized to a 0 to 5 point system
Metacritic_user_nom	The Metacritic user score for the film, normalized to a 0 to 5 point system
IMDB_norm	The IMDb user score for the film, normalized to a 0 to 5 point system
RT_norm_round	The Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score for the film, normalized to a 0 to 5 point system and rounded to the nearest half-star
RT_user_norm_round	The Rotten Tomatoes user score for the film, normalized to a 0 to 5 point system and rounded to the nearest half-star
Metacritic_norm_round	The Metacritic critic score for the film, normalized to a 0 to 5 point system and rounded to the nearest half-star
Metacritic_user_norm_round	The Metacritic user score for the film, normalized to a 0 to 5 point system and rounded to the nearest half-star
IMDB_norm_round	The IMDb user score for the film, normalized to a 0 to 5 point system and rounded to the nearest half-star
Metacritic_user_vote_count	The number of user votes the film had on Metacritic
IMDB_user_vote_count	The number of user votes the film had on IMDb
Fandango_votes	The number of user votes the film had on Fandango
Fandango_Difference	The difference between the presented Fandango_Stars and the actual Fandango_Ratingvalue

Questions

1. Perform an exploratory analysis of the Fandango fan ratings, comparing how much and how often the average Fandango_Ratingvalue differs from the presented aggregate score Fandango_Stars. How much and in what way do the values differ?

2. Split up the Fandango ratings by whether the raw average should be rounded up or rounded down, and compare them to the presented score Fandango_Stars. Does the result following the rounding rules you would expect?

3. Visualize the difference between Fandango ratings (both Fandango_Stars and Fandango_Ratingvalue) and other major platforms. Showcase the systemic differences however you like (hint: you can also use the user vote counts). Can the differences between Fandango’s and other platform’s ratings be explained by the rounding rules? If not, what other factors might explain them?

4. Test the difference between IMDB ratings and Rotten Tomatoes user ratings, the difference between Metacritic critic ratings and Rotten Tomatoes critic ratings, and the difference between Fandango stars and ratings from any other platforms. Is one platform more positive or negative than the others? Interpret the results.

References

Data from https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/tree/master/fandango, under CC-BY.

Walt Hickey. (2015, October 15). Be suspicious of online movie ratings, especially Fandango’s. FiveThirtyEight. URL: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fandango-movies-ratings/