What's the Freshness Rating of Your DVD Collection?

[Loc Nar]

Inspired by the "rate my collection" thread(s), I thought of this little exercise.

Has anyone been bored/crazy enough to run the titles of all the movies in their collection through www.rottentomatoes.com's database to see what the overall average freshness rating of their entire collection is? That perhaps would be the best "objective" rating of your collection, from a pure movie quality angle, of course. This exercise would not factor in the value of certain versions of DVD's over others, e.g. owning the OOP Criterion version of The Killer.

I'm thinking about doing that. 0_0

If anyone else has done or cares to embark on this adventure, post your results here, i.e. Number of Titles Owned and Average Freshness Rating of All Titles Owned.

If a title is not in RT's database, then it is not counted as part of the total scored.

This may take a while (I have about 450 flicks), but I'll bump this thread with my results. I'm curious to see what my collection's average rating turns out to be. I have a lot of great ones, but I also own some real stinkers for pure nostalgic value (can you say Hawk the Slayer?). :0

[Jackskeleton]

I thought of this little exercise

understatement of the year considering most of us have in the hundreds of titles.

Besides that, the whole "rate my dvd..." crap also suffers from the fact that these films were purchased because they are YOUR taste in films. Who cares what the critics say?

[MahatmaPetey]

judging by the number of posts in the rate my collection threads, i'd say quite a few people care.

[majorjoe23]

Originally posted by Jackskeleton
understatement of the year considering most of us have in the hundreds of titles.

Besides that, the whole "rate my dvd..." crap also suffers from the fact that these films were purchased because they are YOUR taste in films. Who cares what the critics say?

I enjoyed the thread a few months back where we posted our collections and people suggested titles for us based on what we had. That seemed to make sense.

[Tscott]

Do they have "freshness ratings" for TV shows, music video collections, live concerts, anime? I don't want a rating of only half my collection.

[Jackskeleton]

Originally posted by MahatmaPetey
judging by the number of posts in the rate my collection threads, i'd say quite a few people care.

millions eat at mcdonalds. Just because the majority do, doesn't make the food not crap. ;)

Rating someone's collection comes with the benefit that you may get a suggestion on a film you never heard of and might like. Rating your collection by film critics average on it seems like a stretch.

[Loc Nar]

Originally posted by Tscott
Do they have "freshness ratings" for TV shows, music video collections, live concerts, anime? I don't want a rating of only half my collection.

I'm pretty sure they only track movie ratings, so it would only be an assessment of your movie collection. Anime movies should be included, but series would not. So, if your collection is only comprised of half movies, it would take you half as long as you thought to rate your collection. :)

I'm going to do it simply for curiosity's sake. I should be able to do 50 titles a night without any trouble.

[gutwrencher]

I rate my own library of titles as...perfect. thats all I need to know. I give it a 10/10 on the Gut-scale.:D:p

[caiman]

I was a little curious so I started doing this, but I totally lost interest somewhere around the Bs. I got through 32 titles, and up to that point, my average is 79.53. I have 295 titles, so there's no telling how it would have changed had I stuck through the whole way.

[Loc Nar]

I have my flicks organized by genres, some combined. I decided to start with my Action/Adventure/Epic titles. There are 51 titles in that grouping. They came up with an overall freshness rating of 81.78 percent. Interesting. What surprised me the most was discovering that The Boondock Saints ranked a 10%. I know that average is going to take a beating when I work through my Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror grouping,which has over 100 titles. :)

Oh, this took about thirty minutes tops. I opened WordPad and made a quick shorthand list of the titles in this genre. Then opened a rottentomatoes window and just alt tabbed between the two until I had the freshness rating for each movie. Then opened Calculator and quickly averaged the scores.

[PopcornTreeCt]

I was thinking there was some program at rottentomatoes that saved a listing of all the movies you looked up and then averaged the rating for you. You have to do it manually? Yikes! Rottentomatoes is not a good indicator itself, because so many reviews that they deem 'fresh' are only mediocre and aren't actually good.

[marty888]

Originally posted by caiman
I was a little curious so I started doing this, but I totally lost interest somewhere around the Bs.

I was a bit confused by your statement until I realized you said "Bs", not "BS".

[wendersfan]

Christ Almighty. I'm unemployed and I still can't imagine spending my time doing this.

[SideShow]

Yeah, um, time spent doing that could be time spent actually WATCHING FILMS.

And my collection is perfect, because I enjoy the hell out of it. Yay me!

[shill66]

The closest I can come to this "little exercise" is this: in my movie database (which is ALL formats, not just DVD) I include up to 15 different ratings from diverse sources (movie guide books mostly, but also newspapers, IMDb's average, my own, and so on) and get an average rating for each movie. I have a big movie collection - currently 2,219 titles. Here are some statistics (I just bring up a report in Access to see this stuff):

Average rating across the database is 64.86 (high 98.5, low 10.0)

Compare:
Leonard Maltin's book covers (or has covered) 90.9% of my movies, and the average Maltin rating of all my movies is 66.91.
Marsha Porter's book covers (or has covered) 84.9% of my movies, and the average Porter rating of all my movies is 65.94.
Steven Scheuer's books covered 73.3% of my movies (his last book was in '91 I think) and his average is 67.68.
Roger Ebert covers only 19.7% of my movies (the online database starts at 1985), and his average is 72.67.
The average from the IMDb ratings is 62.81 (low), but it covers 99.4% of my movies.
My personal rating average is high - 74.22.
TV Guide's movie database covers 94.7% of my movies, and its average is only 56.65 (the lowest of all)!

The top-rated movies in my collection are:
1 Lawrence of Arabia 98.5
2 Citizen Kane 98.33
3 Psycho 98.21
4 The Wizard of Oz 97.60
5 King Kong 97.50
6 High Noon 97.44
7 The Adventures of Robin Hood 97.30
8 The Third Man 97.27
9 The Passion of Joan of Arc 97.22
10 Mr Smith Goes to Washington 97.11

And what's at the bottom? These have ratings averaged from more than 7 different sources:
- Zontar The Thing From Venus 27.75
- The Violent Years 27.50
- She Demons 26.20
- Santa Claus Conquers the Martians 25.88
- I Eat Your Skin 23.62
- King Kong Lives 23.50
- Metalstorm The Destruction of Jared-Syn 22.87
- Dracula vs Frankenstein 22.62
- Shriek of the Mutilated 20.50
- The Creeping Terror 20.44

[shill66]

Oh yeah, how about this list: The highest rated movies in my collection that aren't out on region 1 DVD yet:

1. King Kong (1933) 97.50
2. A Tale of Two Cities (1935) 96.50
3. Foreign Correspondent (1940) 95.90 (coming shortly)
4. Gunga Din (1939) 95.30
5. Napoleon (1927) 95.22
6. The Wind (1928) 95.11
7. Star Wars (1977) 94.36 (coming shortly)
8. Ninotchka (1939) 93.00
9. The Four Feathers (1939) 92.72
10. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) 91.70 (coming shortly)

:)

[Loc Nar]

The holier than thou attitude by some on this board never ceases to entertain me. For some folks, this little exercise would not be a chore but would, in fact, be fun and offer an interesting insight into their collection. And for anyone wit-challenged, the reference to "little exercise" is what is called sarcastic humor. That should have been apparent from the next sentence's reference to being bored/crazy enough to try this.

If you don't want to do it, more power to you! I thought, and still think, it's an interesting idea and will continue to run my collection through the ratings as time permits. Oh, and I don't mind threadcraps at all. Any bump is a good bump. Thanks!

[fryinpan1]

I may attempt this today at work since I do not having anything better to do. I may also add the IMDB average user rating.

[kitkat]

Alright, I went for it. My collection's pretty small so what the heck. My Rotten Tomato score for 58 titles was 88; my IMDB score for 59 titles was 7.7. Just for fun, and since I'm in typing mode, here are the results. I thought some of the differences were interesting. (Darn! I spaced out all the numbers, but when I preview my post they're mashed together. Oh well.)

About a Boy 7.5 93
Alien 8.3 100
Aliens 8.2 100
Alien 3 6.1 35
Alien 4 6.0 54
Amelie 8.7 88
Animal House 7.5 88
Being John Malkovich 7.9 92
Billy Elliot 7.7 86
Bound 7.5 92
Bull Durham 7.2 100
Casablanca 8.8 97
Catch Me If You Can 7.7 97
Contact 7.3 77
Donnie Darko 8.3 79
Election 7.4 89
Fargo 8.2 92
Finding Nemo 8.3 99
Fish Called Wanda, A 7.7 100
Freeway 6.5 78
Frida 7.5 74
Galaxy Quest 7.2 87
Ghost World 7.8 91
Heathers 7.4 100
Hours, The 7.7 79
Hurricane, The 7.3 86
Iris 7.2 78
Jaws 8.2 100
LOTR: Fellowship 8.8 94
LOTR: Two Towers 8.8 98
Manchurian Candidate, The 8.4 100
Matrix, The 8.5 75
Meaning of Life, The 7.3 86
O, Brother, Where Art Thou? 7.8 78
October Sky 7.7 93
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest 8.7 100
Postcards From the Edge 6.3 92
Pride & Prejudice ('95) 9.2
Pulp Fiction 8.7 94
Quills 7.3 74
Reservior Dogs 8.3 93
River's Edge 7.1 90
Romeo Must Die 5.8 37
Run Lola Run 8.2 93
Silence of the Lambs 8.5 97
Sound of Music, The 7.7 96
South Park: BLU 7.6 80
Speed 7.1 93
Swingers 7.6 76
Taxi Driver 8.4 100
Terminator, The 7.9 100
Thelma and Louise 7.3 88
Three Kings 7.4 93
Wag the Dog 7.0 84
Waiting for Guffman 7.6 94
Y Tu Mama Tambien 7.8 92

[clckworang]

I think it would be very interesting to do this, but would take way too much time for me. Perhaps this is something better for me to look at as a long-term goal, because, after all, once you get it completely updated, it would be fairly easy to keep it updated (maybe not fairly easy, but at least it won't put me in a "I'm going to pull out my hair because I am so tired of typing" mood, and making the initial listing would probably put me in that state of mind.)

[Ginwen]

I usually rate them as I watch (based on what I think at that time, not when I first saw it). My average based on that is 7.8/10, which seems about right, since I have a whole lot of 7's and 8's (hey, they can't all be 10's).

I might do the Rotten Tomatoes thing just because it appeals to my compulsive side, but that'll take a while!

[Loc Nar]

kitkat, that's a good idea to share the fruits of your labor, as it were, by posting your collection and the RT Freshness ratings for each. That could save a lot of other folks a lot of time if they have a passing interest in doing this. If enough people contribute in that fashion, that would take a lot of leg work out of it for people with bigger collections.

However, to keep from over-cluttering the thread, it will, no doubt, be best if we attach our results via an .rtf file to a post. I'll do that with mine once I finish my tally. I just finished doing my Animated Section. Found out that Cool World has a 0 Freshness Rating. It's hard being a Bakshi fan. ;)

[kitkat]

However, to keep from over-cluttering the thread, it will, no doubt, be best if we attach our results via an .rtf file to a post.

Cool. I'm not sure how to do that, but I'll edit my post when/if I figure it out. At least my collection is minnow-sized compared to many of the people on this board. Of course if it weren't, I wouldn't have had the patience to do this.

I'm glad it was of interest. I think all of my titles are pretty comman, so I'm sure many of you have a lot - if not all - of them.

[mdc3000]

I would love to see these results, but with 1000 dvds, I certainly don't have that kind of time!

MATT