IMDB is broken…
… or our childhood is
A few days ago, the movie Baby’s day out found mention in a conversation between my friend and I. It was one of the first Hollywood movies I saw as a kid growing in the 90s — a decade of the Indian awakening to all things phoren.
The conversation mushroomed and we fondly remembered numerous titles which opened a whole new world of skyscrapers, giant neon boards, trailer trucks and white christmases to us.
The nostalgia drove me to look these up on the internet, hoping to see some more mawkish drooling over these names.
I was in for a surprise.
Almost all the movies I could think of ranged from average to downright pathetic in terms of ratings. I will let the numbers speak for themselves.
Only one movie — Home Alone I, in this familiar list of 16, makes it beyond 7.0 on IMDB. However, the franchise keeps losing its sheen going from 7.5 to 6.7, to 4.4, and eventually to 2.5 in Home Alone IV (not mentioned here since it released post 2000)
Sequels, as in the case of “Honey I…”, Ace Ventura and the Dalmatians movies have performed worse off than their predecessors. Novelty wore off?
‘Dunston Checks In’ — another movie that was loved by Indian moviegoers (Remember ‘Ek bandar hotel ke andar’) scores an appalling 6% on the tomato-meter — the absolute bottom of ratings on that platform.
Unsurprisingly, The correlation between IMDB (user average) and Rotten Tomatoes (critics average) is just a little over 0.5. Also, for nearly all these movies, over 85–90% of Google users voted “like” — so, why did the same folks go and pan these movies on IMDB? Is IMDB’s algorithm biased?
If it is so, who does one trust?
How is a crowdsourced rating not reflecting popular opinion? What definition of “good” cinema is being shoved down our throats? How would the kids of today ever discover a Baby’s day out or a 101 Dalmatians?
Was our childhood a big, fat lie?
