The Movie Database Support
Support → General
Should unreleased movies have rating?
posted by DominicSTAFFMOD on April 8, 2013 at 7:36 PM
Oblivion has rating of 9.9 even though it's status is "in-production". Should unreleased movies have rating? And if so is it reliable to provide rating then there's only a few votes. In this case it's 1 vote of 9.9 making it most likely very inaccurate. Should there be a minimum votes required before calculating the vote average?
http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/75612-oblivion
Another example: http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/53182-300-rise-of-an-empire Movie seems to be in early production with little about it known, yet it is rated as 10 stars already.
Reply by Travis Bell
on April 8, 2013 at 8:42 PM
This was added but probably much later than the ~75000 range of ids. Probably somewhere closer to id 100000. So for new movies this should be the case but something to keep in mind is that I believe this validation is only checked when a release date exists. If a movie gets some ratings first, then a future release date is added, those ratings are currently left alone.
Reply by Dominic
on April 8, 2013 at 9:33 PM
Makes sense, but maybe the rating field should be disabled until there is a release date or if it is not known (rare) until the status field is set to released?
Reply by Travis Bell
on April 11, 2013 at 9:58 AM
Hey Kelly,
True. I wonder if there should be a grace period for something like this. I was actually just creating the ticket for this.
Maybe we could not show/allow ratings if the release date greater than 1 week in the future?
Reply by Dominic
on April 11, 2013 at 10:04 AM
That's true but I would bet 99% if not 100% of those ratings are from users who don't know what they are doing and simply rate the movie because they like the poster/cast etc... Also there is no reason to have ratings for movies in-production or even rumored. Ratings should either be added only by "editors" or rating volume increased 100 fold to average out the value.