The problem IMO is the first half is an "11" and the second half is a "3." Also, bear in mind that there are thousands of movies you've watched that were completely forgettable and you haven't searched for them here to rate them a "1" or a "2."

@chilidoggg said:

The problem IMO is the first half is an "11" and the second half is a "3." Also, bear in mind that there are thousands of movies you've watched that were completely forgettable and you haven't searched for them here to rate them a "1" or a "2."

Wow, you really think the second half of the film was a dismal 3? I agree it isn't as good as the first half but I wouldn't consider it something so bad that I might walk out of the theater.

I'm also bummed by the second half, although being a student of WWII history and the holocaust, I know that if anything, Fiddler went easy on the suffering.

The second issue is that ratings on newer sites are by younger viewers who don't see this film having any graphic sex, car chases, explosions, or other diversions that millennials enjoy. If the internet existed back in the 70s and those ratings were figured in, Fiddler, Sound of Music, Gone With The Wind, etc. would score higher.

@strntz said:

ratings on newer sites are by younger viewers who don't see this film having any graphic sex, car chases, explosions, or other diversions that millennials enjoy. If the internet existed back in the 70s and those ratings were figured in, Fiddler, Sound of Music, Gone With The Wind, etc. would score higher.

Exactly - and I see this issue on TMDb all the time, as I especially gravitate, on our site, to pages for really old (as in 1920s, '30s, and '40s) movies. The further back a movie is from present day, the less likely the rating is to show a deserved number. Many great long-popular and critically acclaimed movies (including various Academy Awards winners) of the '30s, '40s, and '50s show paltry ratings in the 30-60% range on TMDb. I see similar with various really excellent things that PBS airs - no doubt likewise because PBS programming tends to appeal more to viewers "of a certain age" than to people under age 40 or so.

I think it's an interesting question to find it a fault that films would struggle to surpass 85%. Probably borne of people's ridiculous binary imdb voting - it's a 1/10 or it's 10/10.

Think of this - if nine out of ten people really love a film, they still aren't all going to vote it 10/10. If three of the nine lovers gave it 10/10, three gave it 9/10 and three gave it 8/10 that'd be 81. So the tenth person doesn't even really have to hate it, just think it was ok and you land up with a 85/86 score. Seems more realistic to me...

Citizen Kane has a 8.0 rating on this site... Vertigo is 8.1...

So, don't worry too much about ratings being low...

Although The Dark Knight is rated 8.3, so that probably says a lot about the demographics here... (lots of fanboys...)...

I want to chime in here and add that--unless someone can show me where it is--i cannot see the sample size for the rating. Simply put, if the number of users who have rated the movie is low, even a small number of negative scores will have a significant impact.

Those that care about user scores should contact Travis to request more transparency. The IMDB not only posts the total number of user scores, it provides tools to break them down by age and gender. Without that information, it's hard to regard any scores on this site as valid.

I tend to see TMDB as a very undeveloped, amateur version of iMDB. It's fine and is a useful data source for media players like KODI, but I don't take the users scores or discussions very seriously.

@AlienFanatic That makes sense... I try and not put much stock in movie ratings...

Lots of movies that I like are rated low on different sites, a lot of thought provoking, idiosyncratic and controversial films are rated low as well...

But more importantly, rating on a scale is no way to judge art or even entertainment... I'm much more interested in what a movie makes an audience feel, or what they think of it, rather than a score...

Hello to so many former frequenters of General Chat! It's been months since so many of we past regulars, who used to run in to one another often, have been together in the same place on TMDb.

On the Support forum, a member, during recent days, bumped the following thread, about wishing for ratings transparency:

https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/589ed666c3a3684bad008da2

The same request, by an array of members (myself included), has appeared at various times on the Support forum throughout the last year.

I wish we could know, in addition to how many have voted, the categorical age and gender break-down of who rated what, as that definitely significantly impacts things. However we'll never learn that breakdown information since none of us have ever been asked to indicate either our age or gender.

@AlienFanatic said:

I tend to see TMDB as a very undeveloped, amateur version of iMDB. It's fine and is a useful data source for media players like KODI, but I don't take the users scores or discussions very seriously.

On the "plus" side, at least TMDB has discussions!

Interesting... I like that this site is developing gradually... At least the database is solid and we have discussion boards...

New features are welcome (awards data?), but I'm glad that the core of the site works so well as I use it to organise my blu ray and DVD collection...

@AlienFanatic said:

I want to chime in here and add that--unless someone can show me where it is--i cannot see the sample size for the rating. Simply put, if the number of users who have rated the movie is low, even a small number of negative scores will have a significant impact.

Those that care about user scores should contact Travis to request more transparency.

This is odd because I made another post to this thread earlier covering just this, which either failed to post or was removed for some reason.

Anyway in short I mentioned the API which is free, and relatively easy to use - you can get the total number of ratings for a film and (if I remember correctly) the breakdown per score, eg. All the count of all 1/10s, 2/10s, etc.

So tmdb does make available everything we're talking about here, it's just not the website per se...

@The Midi-chlorian Count said:

I think it's an interesting question to find it a fault that films would struggle to surpass 85%. Probably borne of people's ridiculous binary imdb voting - it's a 1/10 or it's 10/10.

Think of this - if nine out of ten people really love a film, they still aren't all going to vote it 10/10. If three of the nine lovers gave it 10/10, three gave it 9/10 and three gave it 8/10 that'd be 81. So the tenth person doesn't even really have to hate it, just think it was ok and you land up with a 85/86 score. Seems more realistic to me...

Oh, I have about 1400 ratings to my name and you may be hard-pressed to find 20 both 1 or 10 ratings in that whole bunch. But I think 85% for stories and films that traditionally are thought of as great films is not asking all that much.

@Renovatio said:

Interesting... I like that this site is developing gradually... At least the database is solid and we have discussion boards...

New features are welcome (awards data?), but I'm glad that the core of the site works so well as I use it to organise my blu ray and DVD collection...

True. I used it to pull data for my Plex server and it provides great detail in film/TV show description.