Critics are harshest on action movies

I was recently having a conversation with my friend about movies who was complaining about having been forced to watch Manchester by the Sea and how terrible he thought it was. I was surprised because it had gotten such great reviews from critics (96% Fresh according to Rotten Tomatoes), but he thought it was a terrible movie because it was so depressing that he could not enjoy it. I countered that at least it was better than some random action movie, but he disagreed. To him an action movie would have been more entertaining.

I replied that we should separate a movie’s entertainment from its quality. A really high quality movie like Manchester by the Sea might be more boring than a random action movie in the traditional sense, but it has greater depth and a stronger story, leading to more thought provoking conversations. He felt that a movie’s quality should be completely determined by its entertainment value, and how much he enjoyed it was the only thing that really mattered. My viewpoint seemed to anecdotally line up with critics who often praise these deep movies while his seemed like something a random movie watcher might say.

This got us thinking whether critics rate action movies lower than audiences and if this difference is larger than in other genres. We can imagine this kind of debate about “generic critically acclaimed movie” vs. “generic action movie” repeatedly occurring. As action movies tend to be more cliche and have less depth, it stands to reason that critics would like them less than the average person if people tend to be of similar opinion to my friend above.

Given our interest in data analysis, we decided to dig into this idea more. To answer the question we collected data for a little over 4,500 movies from Cinesift, a public ratings aggregator that combines information from Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, and other sites. We compared the critic rating of movies to user rating of movies, multiplying the user rating by 2 because it ranged from 0–5 while the critic rating ranged from 0–10.

Below are boxplots showing the distribution of user and critic ratings separated out by non action and action movies. We can compare the median non action and action movie ratings by users and critics to get a sense of whether our hypothesis holds. Indeed it does look like critics rate action movies slightly lower than users do, but they also appear to rate non action movies lower as well. Critics basically hate everything! Just kidding, but they do seem harsher than users generally.

To get a better sense of our question, we can build a simple regression model. We regress a user’s score minus the critic’s score for the same movie on an action genre dummy variable. If critics rate action movies significantly lower than users do, and this gap is larger than that seen in other genres, then the coefficient on action should be both significant and positive, which is exactly what we see.

On average, the gap between a critic’s score and a user’s score is around 0.6 rating points, but this gap increases by 0.5 to 1.1 rating points for action movies. Indeed critics tend to rate action movies more harshly than users relative to other genres.

Out of curiosity we listed the top 10 action movies with the largest gap between users and critics:

Stereotypically these movies seem to fit the mold of being generic, shallow action movies (indeed no one will claim Big Mommas is as original or deep as something like Get Out).

So what do we take from this? Maybe don’t trust critical reviews of action movies as much as for other genres. Chances are you will like it better than they say if your movie tastes are like the average person.

Credit to Nathaniel Tucker for the coding assistance in Python and help with the data collection and analysis.