What Am I Seeing Here?

IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes have public ratings and critic ratings.

Whenever there's a big gap between the two it usually means a film is either very pretentious and too esoteric for regular audiences, or it is too formulaic and derivative for critics to give it a decent score.

The pretentious-o-meter calculates the difference between critic and public opinion for a film on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. This is then plotted on the meter. Plots towards 'pretentious' mean the audience didn't like it but the critics loved it. Plots towards 'mass market' mean critics didn't care for it but the audience loved it.

The bar colour represents how positive the combined average of both rating types were. The colours represent:

Green : Well liked - The combined score is over 73

: Well liked - The combined score is over 73 Orange : Well, Meh - The combined score is between 61 and 73

: Well, Meh - The combined score is between 61 and 73 Red : Well I wouldn't bother - The combined score is under 61

One thing you might find is old films come up as very pretentious. The theory is because critics like reviewing already well-established classics; so their rating tends to be a lot higher than audiences. Critics factor in things like how innovative it was for it's time, it's impact on cinema, and just plain nostalgic value. I did intend to curb older film's pretentious rating a bit, but I decided against it as they're still overrated in terms of real entertainment value. Tweet me or post on the Pretentious-O-Meter Facebook page if you think I should.

If you want to find some interesting films people have found in the past, check out the Subreddit for Pretentious-O-Meter and post your own with the Reddit share icon above.

Feedback is welcome to niallbeard [at] gmail.com. Source code is free for all and code contributions are warmly welcomed.

I'd also like to express heaps of gratitude to Brian Fritz who created and runs the OMDB API. He has a donation page on the site if you're feeling generous.

You can help support the Pretentious-O-Meter by buying the Spiffy Pretentious Cat T-Shirt

Please attribute me by name (Niall Beard) on any new instances of the website, or on any articles written about it.