Most underrated films

Rotten Tomatoes film ratingsBen Moore was curious about overrated and underrated films.

“Overrated” and “underrated” are slippery terms to try to quantify. An interesting way of looking at this, I thought, would be to compare the reviews of film critics with those of Joe Public, reasoning that a film which is roundly-lauded by the Hollywood press but proved disappointing for the real audience would be “overrated” and vice versa.

Through the Rotten Tomatoes API, he found data to make such a comparison. Then he plotted one against the other, along with a quick calculation of the differences between the percentage of official critics who liked and that of the Rotten Tomatoes audience. The most underrated: Facing the Giants, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, and Grandma’s Boy. The most overrated: Spy Kids, 3 Backyards, and Stuart Little 2.

The plot would be better without the rainbow color scheme and a simple reference line through the even-rating diagonal. But this gets bonus points for sharing the code snippet to access the Rotten Tomatoes API in R, which you can generalize.