none said:
...People's Choice.
Alexr wrote: Below 5, I suppose.
So there's the difference. Would assume most consider that entertainment should have a higher initial expectation. Like grades in school the 60% level is scraping the bottom of the barrel, and that's what many consider a 3 out of 5 star review. 66.6%. (but if you want to add in zero, then 3/5 is 50%...)
But like the polling for presidency rating, anything over 50% like you have it, is saying that it is acceptable and generally positive.
With expectations that low, i'm going to go comment on something else. Which is another value of public opinion which can't easily be determined. The numbers who do go do something else instead of commenting on the piece of culture in question.
I agree with this wholeheartedly as far as the topic is concerned. If I took a test and got 60% I would consider that unsuccessful. If I took a test and got 70%, I wouldn't consider that particularly bad, but I would be disappointed that I didn't do very well, because 70% to me is not exactly a good grade, it's so-so.
Also, if I saw a movie and didn't like, I wouldn't go to its IMDB page and vote against it, and neither would a lot of people I think. If you don't care for a film, you usually simply forget about it and move on, unless the film has just come out and its on the IMDB main page and has a lot of hype about it. IMDB didn't have much registered voters in 1999 compared to today, which is why regular viewers aren't likely to be represented in its rating and why it's probably mostly fans of the film who have taken the time to visit its page over the subsequent years and vote. You have to consider the context. Those interested in the film come back to it, perhaps drawn by all the prequel EU and CW cartoon. So, over time, it's rating has increased in voters due to fan interest, while its earlier rating which likely had non-fan audience participation only had a small number of voters in the first place compared to IMDB movies today. Case in point, in 2004 TPM only had 71,00 votes while today it has over 200,000, so extrapolate back to 1999 and you realize its not a very good representation of audiences. The numbers simply aren't there, and in 1999 a lot of people weren't even on the internet, and didn't know about IMDB anyway so for a film this old its not something to put so much significance on. Probably it was mainly SW fans back in 1999 voting anyway just because average joes didn't use IMDB. In fact, I would say it was fans all along, I remember there were SW websites and message board threads encouraging people to support the film at IMDB.
Even with all the fan interest, it still only scores 6.5, which is on the poor side anyway so it's not like this poll is in its favour other than demonstrating that IMDB viewers like the film a bit better than the critics--this is relative, of course, because critics gave it a lousy 5.2. Its IMDB rating of 6.5 is mediocre. When you average IMDB and critics for an "overall picture" if you even believe in the IMDB numbers, you get 58.5%, which is still a pretty bad failure. You end up in the 50s either way.