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Unlike Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic seems to calculate its ranks based on fairly small numbers of critics’ reviews, so they are more subject to strange fluctuations in the rankings.
In short: Metacritic works a bit like Rotten Tomatoes, but with fewer reviews.
Metacritic seems to place a bit more emphasis on publishers rather than critics, so it’s hard to get an idea what the gender balance of reviewers is. Its top-ranking film – Citizen Kane – is based on reviews from only two women and ten men, though.
Metacritic's all-time top films
****: 1. Citizen Kane
****: 2. The Godfather
****: 3. Casablanca
****: 4. Boyhood
****: 5. Three Colors: Red
****: 6. Singin' in the Rain
****: 7. Moonlight
****: 8. Pan's Labyrinth
****: 9. Hoop Dreams
****: 10. My Left Foot
Why you should ignore all movie-ranking sites
Don’t be tricked into thinking that movie-ranking sites give some kind of objective rating on how good a film is. All three of the above sites are skewed pretty heavily towards the opinions of men.
Take IMDb’s top-ranked film for example – The Shawshank Redemption. Its score of 9.3 is based on the votes of around 1.86 million IMDb users. 1.2 million of those votes came from men. IMDb does tweak its rankings to lessen the influence of particular demographics, but men often make up over 70 per cent of the voters for any film.
And it turns out that men tend to look much more favourably on films with more masculine themes, or male leading actors.
A look at the ratings for Sex and the City demonstrates how divided the voting audience on IMDb is. Over 29,000 men gave the film an average rating of 5.8, while 43,000 women came up with a score of 8.1. A straight-up averaging of the scores gives it a ranking of 7.4, but IMDb’s maths leaves it with a final score of 7.
IMDb breaks down the voting demographics for all of its films. Take a flick through them and you’ll see that men consistently rank masculine films higher than films that feature female leads or more traditionally female themes.
Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t come off much better. In 2015, Meryl Streep attacked the website for featuring way more male critics. Back then, there were 168 female critics on the websites’ approved list, and 760 men. A 2016 study from San Diego State University found that only 27 per cent of ‘top critics’ on the site were women.
There aren’t comprehensive breakdowns for the gender balance on Metacritic, but since it shares many of the same sources at Rotten Tomatoes, it’s likely that the website suffers from a similar degree of bias.
Just pick a film already
If you came here hoping for a verdict on which site should reign supreme in the movie-ranking stakes, then you must be bitterly disappointed. Really, it boils down to this: if you want to know which movies men on the internet tend to like, look on IMDb. If you’re looking for critics’ favourites, go for Rotten Tomatoes. If you want a slightly worse version of Rotten Tomatoes, opt for Metacritic.
Or just watch Inside Out now because it’s lovely and heartwarming and you are clearly incapable of making a decision independently.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
