Methodology

This page explains exactly how the Honest Score is calculated, so nothing about the number you see is a black box.

Two scores, not one

Every film gets a press score and an audience score, calculated separately from different sets of sources. They are never blended into a single overall number, because doing so would hide the very disagreement that's often the most useful thing to know about a film.

Base trust weight

Each source starts with a base trust weight from 0 to 100%, reflecting how resistant it is to manipulation:

Metacritic — 100%. Built from a fixed, curated list of professional publications; individual reviews can't be brigaded.
CinemaScore — 100%. Collected in theater lobbies on opening night, before online backlash or hype campaigns can form.
Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer — 75%. Professional critics, but self-submitted rather than curated by RT itself.
Letterboxd — 80%. A engaged, identity-linked user base that tends to resist coordinated manipulation better than fully anonymous platforms.
Other press average — 50%. Reviews outside Metacritic/RT's tracked lists, harder to verify systematically.
Social sentiment — 60%. A qualitative read on overall online reaction.
IMDb user rating — 45%. Open to anyone, easiest of the major platforms to organize a vote brigade on.
Rotten Tomatoes Popcornmeter — 40%. Fully anonymous and, historically, the platform most frequently targeted by coordinated review-bombing.
Conversation volume — 30%. A rough popularity signal, not a quality signal.

Volume confidence

A rating backed by 5 votes and one backed by 50,000 votes shouldn't count the same. For sources where a vote or review count is available, we scale confidence logarithmically up to a cap (for example 500,000 IMDb votes or 300 Rotten Tomatoes reviews) — enough volume to smooth out outliers, without requiring an unrealistic sample size to reach full confidence.

The formula

For each enabled source: weight = (your weight % ÷ 100) × volume confidence. The press score is the weighted average of every press-side source with data; the audience score is the weighted average of every audience-side source with data. A source with no data contributes nothing — it is not treated as zero, it is simply excluded, and the page always shows exactly how many of the possible sources are actually feeding into each score.

Adjusting the weights yourself

Every weight and every source's on/off switch is visible and editable directly on the tool, behind the "Show weighting controls" toggle. If you disagree with our defaults — for example, if you trust Letterboxd more than we do, or want to exclude conversation volume entirely — change it, and the score recalculates immediately.

What is deliberately excluded

Budget, marketing spend, and box office performance are shown separately and never factored into either score. They describe a film's commercial reach and expectations, not its quality, and mixing the two would let a big marketing budget quietly inflate a score it didn't earn.