FiveThirtyEight analysis finds inflated, rounded-up reviews at Fandango

Boy, Fandango users sure love movies... and they love those specific movies more than users at any other site. (credit: FiveThirtyEight)

There's no telling exactly why a film, TV series, or toaster oven's weighted review score appears as it does at various review and commerce sites, in spite of those sites usually declaring how they weigh the opinions of users and experts to account for vote tampering and other anomalies.

But sometimes, the scores just seem too good to be true. In the case of movie ticket-sales site Fandango, the statisticians at FiveThirtyEight began poring through Fandango's data to figure out why its user reviews for badly reviewed films seemed so inflated—and they made a convincing case that the site is nearly incapable of giving a film anything less than three-out-of-five stars.

FiveThirtyEight contributor Walt Hickey confirmed to Ars Technica that he and a friend first became suspicious when they noticed a three-star rating on Fandango's page for the August reboot of Fantastic Four. "On what damn planet is that film a 3.0?" Hickey said to Ars.