About Honest Cinema Score

Honest Cinema Score exists because a single blended number hides more than it reveals. Most review aggregators average professional critics, casual visitors, and social media chatter into one figure, as if a coordinated review-bombing campaign and a curated panel of film critics deserved equal weight. They don't, and treating them as equal throws away exactly the information that matters most: whether a film is genuinely loved, merely popular, or the target of an organized backlash.

We built this tool to separate press opinion from audience opinion, and to be transparent about exactly where every number comes from. Nothing is hidden: every source has an adjustable editorial weight, and you can turn any source on or off, or change how much it counts, and watch the score respond immediately.

Where the data comes from

When you pick a film, your browser asks two open sources directly. Wikidata, the free and openly licensed (CC0) knowledge base, supplies the film's details, budget, box office, any review scores it holds (each marked with the year it dates from) and the exact page of the film on each review site. Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) supplies the plot summary. No review site is scraped, and no film database is copied.

Scores that visitors enter by hand are kept, but only shown to others once several different visitors agree on about the same value, and each one is labelled “Community” with the number of confirmations.

Very new films often have no scores anywhere yet. For those, and for sources that have no open data such as CinemaScore, each row has a button that opens the film's page on the source site, so you can read the number and paste it in. Every filled-in value stays editable, and a small badge shows where it came from.

Why the weighting matters

Our weights are adjustable editorial preferences, not scientifically established reliability percentages. An opening-night survey, an average rating and a percentage of positive reviews measure different things. See the methodology and its limitations before interpreting an index difference.

Who runs this

Honest Cinema Score is an independent project, not affiliated with IMDb, Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, CinemaScore, or any studio or distributor. Film data and trademarks belong to their respective owners; we aggregate publicly available and user-submitted figures for comparison purposes.

Who makes this?

Honest Cinema Score is an independent project by Daan Jaeger. The tool helps readers inspect sources; it does not replace a review or establish an objectively correct score. Corrections and collaboration proposals can be sent through the contact page.