Users and critics and genres! Oh My!

by Thomas van Wageningen

At Veboli, we’re always thinking of ways to improve the movie advice we give the movie lovers on our site. Last summer we rounded up movie critics from all over the world, including five here at MaddWolf, to connect movie lovers to critics that best understand their own taste in movies. This, of course, generates a lot of data (Holy crap, there are more than 20,000 reviews!). With all that data, I wondered: how do you users compare to critics?

Before diving into the genres, let’s look at how the critics here at MaddWolf compare to the average user’s ratings on Veboli. George Wolf’s taste in movies is the most similar to the average Veboli user, Rachel Willis’ taste is the most unique. Below is a table of all the MaddWolf movie critics and their average difference from the average user rating on Veboli.

Take Fight Club and The Lion King for example. The average ratings on Veboli for these two movies are 7.6 and 7.3. George gave these two movies an 8 and a 7 whereas Rachel gave them a 6 and a 10. Most of George’s ratings are pretty close to the the average rating of all of the users on Veboli while Rachel has more ratings that are farther from the average.

Looking at the table, I at first thought MaddWolf’s got three pretty average critics and two more unique ones. Which it turns out was a pretty accurate statement. The average critic has an average difference per rating of 1.08. But this misses an even bigger pattern! The average user has an average difference per rating of 1.51. Users on Veboli are a pretty diverse group of movie lovers. Some of the users even have an average difference of higher than 5. That’s crazy! If users on average give a movie a 5, these users would give it either a 0 or a 10.

I thought that horror would have the largest average difference between users and critics. I thought laughing, sympathizing and thinking are things that most people generally like in movies. But being scared is something that some people love and others hate. But horror’s only the sixth most disagreed upon genre, with adventure, science fiction, action, fantasy, and drama all having slightly higher average differences in ratings by users and critics.

So what did I find? It seems like factual movies (documentaries and historical movies) are less controversial than the more fictional movies (fantasy, horror and science fiction). The more energetic, fast-paced movies (action and adventure) are generally the most controversial. Below is a table of all the genres and the average difference in ratings between users and critics. The lower the average difference, the more users and critics agree about the movies in that genre.

Head over to Veboli to see more movies that users and critics disagree or agree on. If you’d like to see more of the data on how users compare to movie critics explored, let us know in the comments below!

PS, The Wizard of Oz has a difference of 2.3, critics seem to like it much more than users.