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.

Editorial weights, not reliability percentages

The default weights are the creator's adjustable preferences, not measured probabilities that a source is accurate or resistant to manipulation. There is no validation study establishing that one platform is 80% reliable and another 45% reliable. The existing defaults are retained so comparisons do not silently change, but they should be treated as an experiment.

• Metacritic: 100%; CinemaScore: 100%; Rotten Tomatoes critics: 75%; Letterboxd: 80%; other press: 50%; IMDb: 45%; Rotten Tomatoes audience: 40%.
• Social sentiment and conversation volume are displayed separately. They never feed into either headline index.

These scales answer different questions

The Tomatometer and Popcornmeter measure the share of positive reviews or ratings. IMDb and Letterboxd report averages on different numeric scales; CinemaScore uses letter grades from opening-night surveys. Multiplying an average to a 0–100 scale does not make it equivalent to a positive-review percentage. A 100% Tomatometer does not mean a 10/10 average. A gap can arise from these different measures rather than a disagreement about quality.

Our letter-grade mapping is a display convention, not CinemaScore's own conversion: A+ 97, A 93, A− 90, B+ 87, B 83, B− 80, C+ 77, C 73, C− 70, D+ 67, D 63, D− 60, F 40.

Verified and all-audience Rotten Tomatoes ratings

Rotten Tomatoes distinguishes verified ticket-purchase ratings from all-audience ratings. Do not mix the two without stating which was used. The open data available to this tool does not always identify that distinction; if it is unknown, verify the source page before interpreting or manually entering its percentage. We do not describe all audience ratings as anonymous.

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) — a display heuristic, not a statistical confidence interval or a guarantee against coordinated manipulation. If a source has no vote-count field, its multiplier is 0.70. If it has a count field but no positive count is entered, its multiplier is 0.55. Otherwise the multiplier is 0.5 + 0.5 × min(1, log10(count + 1) / log10(cap + 1)). The count units are shown beside each field.

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 a critic source — 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.

Coverage, dates and personal changes

Open-data coverage is incomplete. Missing sources never count as zero, and we show no gap unless both sides contain a positive-weight rating. Wikidata dates belong to the original statements, not necessarily the day you visit. Bundled examples are labelled as undated snapshots. Local edits remain personal; copying a film link does not publish your edits. AI suggestions start excluded and need source verification before you enable them. Community agreement is not independent verification.

Primary documentation

Rotten Tomatoes · Metacritic · CinemaScore · Wikidata licensing. Methodology updated 30 October 2026.