How Does 'The Interview' Have a Near-Perfect IMDb Score?
To judge from its IMDb user rating, The Interview is a massive hit with audiences. The truth, of course, is that The Interview doesn’t really have an audience: Because Sony cancelled its release following threats of terrorism, few people have seen it. So how does an unreleased comedy get one of the highest user ratings on the movie reference website? The answer is that people are up-voting The Interview, which stars Seth Rogen and James Franco as journalists sent to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, in solidarity against censorship. (Hat tip to Mediaite for the story.)
As of this writing, over 28,000 IMDb users have accumulated a score of 9.9/10 for the film. Earlier in the day, it was hovering at a perfect 10. In part, this appears to be the work of the web community 4Chan, where, according to Mediaite, a user suggested voting up The Interview to get it into the IMDb Top 250. It’s not there yet, because the number of voters weighs into IMDb’s calculation; for example, the longtime no. 1 film The Shawshank Redemption has over 1.3 million votes. But in terms of rating alone, The Interview is beating out everything on the list, including Shawshank (9.2), The Godfather (9.2) and Pulp Fiction (8.9). Meanwhile, over at Rotten Tomatoes, The Interview has acquired an audience score of 96 percent.
Related: An Interview With Someone Who’s Seen ‘The Interview’
None of these scores change The Interview’s mixed ratings from critics who have actually seen the film: The comedy has a 53 percent positive rating on the Tomatometer and a 47 percent Metascore on Metacritic. Still, gaming a film’s audience rating has become a popular way for fans to exercise control over their favorite film’s reputation. Sometimes it works, like when Joss Whedon fans successfully upvoted Serenity, the feature film sequel to the cult TV series Firefly, into the IMDb Top 250 in 2005. Other times it fails miserably, like when Kirk Cameron campaigned in November for fans to vote up his critically maligned film Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas on Rotten Tomatoes. Cameron’s devotees briefly got the Tomatometer up to 94 percent before it plummeted back down to its current 32 percent audience rating. The backlash against Cameron’s score-inflating tactics may explain what happened on IMDb, where Saving Christmas is now rated the worst movie of all time.
