Daily Archives: December 25, 2001

Dec 25 2001

Fellowship is Number One!

I can’t believe it, but Fellowship has displaced titles such as “The Godfather” and “The Shawshank Redemption” at the #1 spot!

[[The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring]] is now #1. I don’t know how long it will remain at the top of the list, but after looking at the formula, it will become very difficult for it to be knocked off its pedestal.

###The Formula

The formula for calculating the top 250 films gives a true Bayesian estimate:

weighted rank (WR) = (v / (v+m)) ** R + (m / (v+m)) ** C

where:

  • **R** = average for the movie (mean) = (Rating)
  • **v** = number of votes for the movie = (votes)
  • **m** = minimum votes required to be listed in the top 250 (currently 1250)
  • **C** = the mean vote across the whole report (currently 6.9)

What does all this mathematical gibberish mean? Well, it means that as more and more votes are cast, the **MEDIAN*’ (mathematical average) of the rankings matters more than the ‘*MEAN**. I believe that this is an attempt by the [[IMDB]] to give more weight to the average rank of a movie as more and more people decide to vote on it (which makes sense).

And right now, the median is 9.5 while the mean is 6.9, so as I understand it, as more votes are cast, if they are cast around the current median, the value that’s used for the rankings will approach 9.5, which is a full 1/2 point higher than the second place movie! Unbelievable!!!!