In addition to loving movies, I also love stats. Evaluating data and analyzing numbers is fascinating to me. I have a long commute, and while driving home from work recently, I got to thinking about how my personal favorite films compare to the consensus of critics and other movie fans. To determine this, I’ve taken all 141 feature films that I’ve rated as ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and created a sortable spreadsheet that includes the following data for each film: Rotten Tomatoes Score, RT User Score, Letterboxd Score, and Metacritic Score. These are all favorites of mine and I would fight over any of them. Below is an analysis of the data. What I discovered was at times incredibly predictable, but nonetheless very interesting.

The Best

Twelve of my favorite films hold a perfect 100% rating on RT. They range from the oldest film on my list to one of the newest.

By comparison, the top eleven as compared to highest RT User Score (96 and up) only features TWO of the same titles.

And as compared to the top fifteen highest Letterboxd Score (87 and up) – THREE match the top RT list and SIX match the top RT User list.

None of this data is very surprising, honestly. Users tend to favor a mixture of classics and more modern films, while critic ratings for the highest films largely skew toward older movies. But enough of that, what I’m most interested in is how the bottom films in my list of favorites match-up with the ratings of others.

The Worst

Here are my Bottom 10, as sorted by lowest Rotten Tomatoes score. It pains me to see two of my all-time top 10 favorites on this list (Top Gun and Interstellar). Most of these don’t surprise me, though.

By comparison, here are the lowest-scored eleven films per RT User Score. Many of the same films appear, but also some real shockers. Check out the difference in RT User score and RT score. Movies like The Blair Witch Project, Phantom Thread, The Shallows, The Cabin in the Woods, Inside Llewyn Davis, and Silence are much preferred by critics while films like Passengers and Reality Bites were liked far better by general audiences.

The comparison between RT critic score and Letterboxd was very, very similar for the lowest group. Some of the films I love, but other users don’t, also include 2015’s Cinderella, Top Gun, Pacific Rim, Miracle, and The Spectacular Now.

It’s highly likely that no one will care about this data but me, and that’s okay. This was a fun exercise in exploring where my movie taste diverges from critical and popular opinion. To wrap up, here are some average scores for my favorite films. (Note: Metacritic was not included in the above analysis due to several high-scoring films not being rated on their site, which would have skewed my data a bit.)

Rotten Tomatoes – 89.16
RT User Score – 87.25
Letterboxd – 79.54
Metacritic – 80.47

Overall, not too bad! My favorites are generally considered the equivalent of a 4-star film or higher. I can accept that. If anyone is interested in seeing the entire list of my favorite films with all scores, you can view that here.

Aaron White is a Seattle-based film critic and co-creator/co-host of the Feelin’ Film Podcast. He is also a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society. He writes reviews with a focus on the emotional experience he has with a film. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter to be notified when new content is posted.