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Sport movies named the most popular film genre, study reveals

Writer's picture: Hinton MagazineHinton Magazine
  • Sport films have been named the most popular film genre across three major film rating platforms, a new data-driven study has revealed.

  • The Film Rating Study collated data from IMDb, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, looking at the platforms’ perception of over 350 award-winning and popular films.

  • Sport came out on top as the best-rated genre, scoring the highest average rating of 7.8/10 - beating the likes of horror, action and sci-fi to the top spot.

  • Historical dramas and biographical films came in behind both with 7.7/10, while horror movies were the harshest-rated film genre with 5.9/10.


Sport movies have been named the most popular film genre, across three major film rating databases, according to a new survey.


The Film Rating Study pulled the ratings for over 350 recently-released and critically-acclaimed films, looking at IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, to gauge which platforms feature the most accurate ratings, and which are the harshest overall.


The study showed that the average sports film boasts a rating of 7.8/10, the highest average rating genre across all three film databases.


Although sporting the highest average score, sports films proved to be the most divisive genre, with a 21% discrepancy in ratings seen between the analysed platforms.


The most well-received sports film in the study came out as the 2021 Academy Award-winning King Richard, which earned a solid 8/10 across the critic platforms.


Following closely behind sports, historical drama films and biographical films also proved popular amongst the amateur film critics, with both genres sporting a healthy 7.7/10.


While sport was the best-rated genre, horror films were the most harshly reviewed, with the average horror film receiving a moderate rating of 5.9/10.


Even this year’s highest-rated horror so far - Jason Blum’s The Black Phone (8.6/10) - hasn’t managed to change the genre’s bad rep, or databases’ poor treatment of the films.


Joining horror amongst the worst-received genres were, surprisingly, action movies (5.9/10) and thrillers (6/10).


The study found there to be massive fluctuations in genre perception between databases, with a massive 53% difference between drama and action film ratings reported on Metacritic, and a 43% difference for drama versus mystery films seen on Rotten Tomatoes.


In fact, the study found that there’s a difference in harshness and reliability between all film databases, with Rotten Tomatoes found to be the most reliable and fair, while IMDb is the least reliable and Metacritic the harshest.

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