All movie goers in India must have already used the popular movie ticket booking portal BookMyShow or at least must be aware of it. Besides letting you book movie tickets online, the app also has a movie rating feature (heart rating) which is displayed on the film’s page on BookMyShow after a particular film is released in theatres.
As per the website, the movie rating is calculated by a complex formula which considers weighted average of ratings given by three sources – ticket buyers, non-transacting users, and critic reviews. All three sources have different weightage.
Now, if we compare two recently released Indian movies namely ‘Sita Ramam’ and ‘Bimbisara’, currently both these films have the same movie ratings – 92%, to be precise. But there is a catch.
In the case of ‘Sita Ramam’, the film had a higher rating of 96% on BookMyShow just a few days back. So, why did the heart rating suddenly decrease from 96% to 92%?
It was apparently because of the addition of one critic review from a leading publication, which has given ‘Sita Raman’ 3.5 stars (equivalent to 70% rating). And since the weightage of a critic review should be much more than regular ticket buyers, it resulted in a significant percentage drop with respect to the BookMyShow rating for ‘Sita Ramam’.
On the contrary, in the case of ‘Bimbisara’, no critic review has been added on BookMyShow till the time of writing this article. For E.g., the same reviewer has given the same rating of 3.5 stars (or 70% rating) for ‘Bimbisara’. If this critic’s review was considered, then the BookMyShow heart rating for ‘Bimbisara’ would have dropped to somewhere around 88% from 92%.
So, ultimately the BookMyShow movie rating seems to be unfair for ‘Sita Ramam’ when compared to ‘Bimbisara’. And the same concept might hold true for other films also which we might have not noticed yet.
Even if the BookMyShow heart ratings for movies are calculated automatically by the system, why a critic review for one film is included and for the other one omitted, is a matter of concern. On what basis these critic reviews are included or excluded for a particular movie, is not clear to us. A potentially more transparent and fair way might be to either exclude all critic reviews or include all available critic reviews for all movies. Besides including the ticket buyers’ ratings of course. Not doing that might give an inaccurate picture w.r.t perceived notion among audiences about the film.
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