MovieChat Forums > The Philadelphia Story (1941) Discussion > How is His Girl Friday in the Top 250 an...

How is His Girl Friday in the Top 250 and This Isn't?

posted 13 years ago by Flight_of_Fantasy
3 replies | jump to latest

I'm not just saying this because The Philadelphia Story is, in my opinion, the superior film. No, I honestly don't understand how HGF makes the Top 250 and TPS doesn't. Both have a rating of 8.1/10, but while HGF has (as of this writing) 24,164 votes, TPS has 31,225 votes! How is it that when two films have the exact same rating, but one has 7000 more votes than the other, the one with less votes is in the Top 250, while the one with more isn't?!

For that matter, as I was writing this, I thought of Bringing Up Baby, and when I checked its IMDb rating, sure enough, it scored 8.1/10 with 25,387 votes. Even that had more votes than His Girl Friday, and it's not in the Top 250!

Will someone please explain this to me?

"He's already attracted to her. Time and monotony will do the rest."

[–] arubi2 13 years ago

My theory: IMDB only shows the significant figures so HGF might actually have an 8.14 rating while TPS has an 8.12 rating.

I'm very pleased that comedic masterpiece is in the top 250, which means people actually have some taste around here.

[–] PillowRock 13 years ago

Nope, that's not the issue.

If you read the description of what the Top 250 is, you'll find that they weight different votes differently for the purposes of the Top 250 list. They do that in an effort to minimize the impact on the list of people doing things like "attack voting" to lower the score of a movie they've never seen or of creating bunches of accounts just to vote for one movie. They are purposely extremely vague about exactly how those weighting calculations work because they don't want people trying to game the system.

By contrast, the "average rating" listed on a movie's page is just the straight raw mean of all of the votes. That's an entirely different number than the one that determines the Top 250. Going just by those listed average scores, it's not hard to find non-Top-250 movies that are rated significantly higher than some movies in the Top 250.

[–] k_luifje 13 years ago

FWIW, it used to be in the Top 250 for years: http://www.timo-schreiter.de/imdb/?title=0032904.

Marco.