Going all Bill James on Movies - CEVR

I love comparative statistics. Can't get enough of them. There's something about discovering how something is better than another thing that I just find fascinating. Maybe that's why I enjoy fantasy sports so much. But that's another story. Tonight (and tomorrow) I want to delve into something else that has statistics readily available online - movies. Friday's release and subsequent warm reception of the Sam Raimi-directed Drag Me to Hell is what got me really thinking specifically about the 3 main sites which track statistics on how good a movie is judged to be: Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, and IMDb.

Drag Me to Hell will certainly not be in the running for any major best-of awards at the end of the year - yet it is among the year's best-reviewed movies to date, holding a score of 82 on Metacritic, a 94% and "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a user rating of 8.2 on IMDb. For those unfamiliar with how these sites arrive at these scores, here's a brief summary.

1) Metacritic takes the average numerical scores given to a movie in a review (and when no score is given, it's approximated)
2) Rotten Tomatoes decides if a review is merely positive and negative - the percent denotes how many reviews are positive
3) IMDb allows users to rate the movie themselves
*For more info, visit the respective websites*

Whoops

So yeah...I kind of forgot about this. School will do that to you. But it's summer now, so I'm going to do my best to keep this going at a pretty consistent rate. It's about time I did. And that's all I've got for now.