IMDB vs. Rotten Tomatoes Ratings

I usually check both

I check NEITHER. Both are worthless as far as I'm concerned.

IMDB has been taken over by voting bots / fake accounts (just check Uno: The Movie for an example)

Rotten Tomatoes puts too much focus on high nose snobby critics. If you honestly think Boyhood was the best movie ever then you are insane.

I've come to rely on watching trailers as my sole means of determining whether to watch a movie.

RT gives the Ghostbusters remake 73% fresh rating... worst film site on the internet.

If a movie or TV show is below 5 out of 10 with thousands of consensus votes, I usually don't bother checking it out...

These thoughts are based on serious number crunching (data analysis) of many hundreds of films that I had seen and rated myself.

First, you want use the Rotten Tomatoes Average rating, not the Tomato Meter. It has the advantage of being on a 10-point scale, just like the IMDB rating. And it's even better than the Metacritic score

Neither number is better. It's great when they agree, but there are films that are great that the other side misses. I would watch any movie that sounds interesting that has either a good score from one or the other.

This year DEADPOOL had a much higher rating at IMDB than with critics. Years ago, THE PRESTIGE, ditto. THE FALL was actually rotten at RT while it was rocking an 8.0+ at IMDB (it's still 7.9). The film geeks were correct on these.

OTOH, films that are in any way difficult can have undeservedly low IMDB scores. If critics love a film and describe it as artful, thoughtful, or whatever, and that's your cup of tea, you can ignore the IMDB rating. I think UPSTREAM COLOR is one of the two best films of ordinary length I've ever seen, but it has a 6.8 at IMDB because it's really hard to make sense of.

RT i thought was good because the reviews seemed more honest... but these days i dunno

both are garbage