The rating system is not that popular for Telugu movies until the last decade. There were reviews in print media that don’t give away the entire story and never rate the movie. At that time, the use internet is limited and the reviews are limited to a handful of sites. But within the past decade, things have changed a lot and the internet became as familiar as television. The audience started to check reviews and ratings before watching a movie, particularly when multiple movies release together. This led to a competition among websites to publish reviews and rate movies.
Telugu movies in IMDB
IMDB is primarily a movie database site that provides information about as many movies as possible. The IMDB ratings are the weighted averages of ratings given by users. Most of them have absolutely no knowledge of films and they rate 10 stars to the movies they like and 1 star to those they don’t like. The ratings of almost all popular Telugu movies follow this trend, except that the fans always rate high and the haters always rate low. This leads to an extremely biased rating. The regular movies without a star cast are generally rated between 5 and 8, and they don’t change much.
We can see this trend in recent movies ‘Rangasthalam’, ‘Bharat ane nenu’ and ‘Naa peru Surya Naa illu India’. One thing common among these movies is that a very small percentage of people give 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 stars ratings. Almost 80-90% of the users give them either 1, 8, 9, or 10. A huge number of people give 10 stars ratings only because of the star cast.
So, most of the popular movies start with almost 10 stars ratings and slowly fall to around 7-8 overtime. This is understandable as those users are ardent fans of those actors. But the madness doesn’t stop here. The IMDB ratings of Top 1000 voters to some of the greatest Telugu movies are listed below.
The ratings of classic Telugu movies in IMDB
They do it with a purpose, that is to get rid of them from the Top 250 Indian films list. Eventually, none of the Telugu movies are in the Top 50 of this list, and none of our classics find a place in this list. This list is no benchmark to judge the movies and most other Hindi movies are equally unworthy. But the problem is that many users underrate classics to elevate the average movies of the current generation.
This problem is not just limited to Indian cinema, but almost every movie suffers it. While Hollywood has other dedicated rating sites like rotten-tomatoes and Metacritic, Indian cinema has no other option. If an actor or actress makes a controversial statement that offends a group of people, then they run a campaign to reduce the rating by giving 1-star ratings. Similarly, the fans run campaigns to increase the rating by giving 10 stars ratings. Several people decided to protest against such behavior and more than 20,000 people rated a North Korean movie titled ‘The interview’ 10 stars even before its release. Later, many general users of IMDB have given it lower ratings to bring it down.
Accuracy of IMDB rating distribution
The IMDB ratings don’t represent normal distribution which is a sign of biased ratings. The tendency of the huge number of 1 star or 10 stars ratings to movies that are neither terrible nor outstanding shows the influence of actors on movies. Many users, particularly youngsters give 10 stars ratings to movies even before watching them, just to show their loyalty. The user ratings of popular Telugu movies on IMDB are much higher than what most of them deserve. The initial ratings are always high and they eventually fall over time. So, IMDB ratings are no standard for comparing Telugu movies and we can consider them as a rating of popularity instead of quality.
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