Some people give stars, usually from 0 to 4 stars, with a four-star movie being fabuloso. But then, reviewers find that a five-level scale isn’t nuanced enough, so they end up giving half-stars, which makes it a ten-level scale.
So I figured, why not grade from one to ten? Everyone who went to school in the US understands grades; they understand getting “a hundred” on a test is great, and getting ninety is still damn fine.
In my mind, 9s and 10s are “must-see.” 7s and 8s are “see.”6 is “probably see” and 5 is “probably don’t see” and after that, don’t waste your time.
IMDB uses 1 to 10 for their rating system, but with so many voters with so many opinions you can pretty much assume anything 6 and up is pretty good. Serenity has an 8.0 right now, proving that it wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea. (What is wrong with people?) For the first couple of months it was in the high 8’s and on the “Best 250 films of all time” list. Serenity is still in the top 10 under the genre sci-fi for the MOVIEmeter (click popularity) and it looks like everything above it is still in production.
The top rated film on IMDB right now is The Godfather with a 9.1 and 151,845 votes. The top rated Sci-Fi film is The Empire Strikes Back with an 8.7 and 125,421 votes.
On the other end of the range when you see a 5ish rating it may be crap, but it may be your kind of crap, ya know? For instance Cutthroat Island is a 5.1 but it is one of the movies I love and can watch over and over. Very rarely does anything in the 4 and below range turn out to be worth watching.
Sorry… I guess you tapped one of my great interests…
Undoubtedly I got it from IMDb, where I have been hanging around since before they even had message boards. I think it’s a asensible scoring system, but you have to wait, with new movies, for things to shake out.
8 is actually very, very high on the IMDb. People get mad at a movie they didn’t like and give it a 1 just to be snotty, and that throws off the average. Even great, great classics usually hit about 7 or so.