There's no telling exactly why a film, TV series, or toaster oven's weighted review score appears as it does on various review and commerce sites, in spite of those sites usually declaring how they weigh the opinions of users and experts to account for vote tampering and other anomalies.

But sometimes, the scores just seem too good to be true. In the case of movie ticket-sales site Fandango, the statisticians at FiveThirtyEight began poring through Fandango's data to figure out why its user reviews for badly reviewed films seemed so inflated—and they made a convincing case that the site is nearly incapable of giving a film anything less than three out of five stars.

FiveThirtyEight contributor Walt Hickey confirmed to Ars Technica that he and a friend first became suspicious when they noticed a three-star rating on Fandango's page for the August reboot of Fantastic Four. "On what damn planet is that film a 3.0?" Hickey said to Ars.

Hickey proceeded to explore the strange terrain of planet Fandango, an NBCUniversal subsidiary, where he analyzed 209 films that had tickets sold through the site this year and had at least 30 user reviews. None of those films had "overall" review scores lower than three stars, and 78 percent were given four stars or more. Compared to popular movie-industry sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, the ratings divide looked glaring—which FiveThirtyEight made clear with a chart that compared normalized movie rating scores between those sites and more. (With a wider net cast, Hickey found that out of 437 films with at least one review, 98 percent score three stars or higher.)

The report also confirmed that Fandango's star ratings, which are presented to users as an image of full and half stars, are based off integer values in the site's HTML files—and those values are always rounded up. Out of 437 sampled films, 142 of them had their star ratings boosted 0.3 or 0.4 stars higher than what was listed in the HTML, while 37 of the films got a remarkable 0.5 star boost. Fandango told FiveThirtyEight that this issue is a "glitch" that will be fixed "as soon as possible" and that it doesn't affect how star ratings appear on Fandango's iOS app.

Hickey guessed that the apparently inflated scores could be due to a form of buyer's remorse, though Fandango doesn't require purchase verification before users can publish a review. Still, Hickey confirmed to Ars that he'd written a Python script to pull every single individual star rating and confirm that the listed value matched the thousands of reviews that had been submitted. "Now, if all those reviews are legit?" Hickey said to Ars. "That's a very good question that someone with better natural language processing skills than me should probably do."