Overall ratings for reviews.

[Tony K.]

I've been reading reviews on this site for a while and enjoy most of what I read. But I'm a bit baffled sometimes as to why your "official reviewers" can't learn to average numbers. This is Blu-ray.com, a site where people discuss, learn about, keep track of, and/or discover news and reviews about products or entities pertaining to the Blu-ray Disc format (or I guess, in some cases, the eventuality of it). Coincidentally, you also have a stable of regular reviewers who rate and review various movie and music Blu-ray discs. But in all these years I've been reading, it has seriously bugged me that an "Overall Rating" is often miscalculated.

According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of "overall" is as follows:

1 : all over <the pattern used overall>

2 : from one end to the other <600 feet long overall>

3a : in view of all the circumstances or conditions <overall, the sale was a success>

b : as a whole : generally <doesn't do as well overall>

c : with everyone or everything taken into account <was third overall in earnings> <got 31 miles to the gallon overall>

I'm aiming for 3b; "as a whole." Whole. That means the average of all scores within a BD review: Movie + Video + Audio + Extras / 4 (the number of fields within the review) = Overall (or add the 3D score, and divide by 5 for 3D discs).

So in the case of say..

Taken 2:

Movie = 2.5
Video = 4.5
Audio = 4.0
Extras = 3.0
Overall = 2.5

That should be a total of 14 points divided 4 categories, which comes out to an average overall score of 3.5. Despite what the reviewer thought of the actual movie, the disc itself, as a product, is still rated worse than say..

Dick Tracy:

Movie = 4.0
Video = 4.0
Audio = 4.5
Extras = n/a
Overall = 4.0

The movie has no extras at all, so technically you don't even have to calculate it into the equation, so you can still say a total of 12.5 points divided by 3 categories give you an overall score 4.16, which is pretty close to that 4.0. But then you take a movie like..

Man on Fire:

Movie = 4.5
Video = 4.5
Audio = 4.0
Extras = 0.5
Overall = 4.0

For this one, you could also argue that a mere theatrical trailer doesn't count as a kind of "extra" either. So with Movie, Video, and Audio that would actually be 13 divided by 3, which equals 4.33 rounded down or up whichever way you like to a 4.0 or 4.5. Or, 13 divided by 4 (counting the .5 for the Extras) to get a 3.25, which rounds down or up to a 3.0 or 3.5.

I'm just wondering if a movie has no extras whatsoever, shouldn't the "n/a" still count as a 0 and total into the equation? Because if Extras are supposed to be part of the overall package, then why not count it as part of the score? Even if it's (subjectively) a really great movie with really great Video and Audio, but no extras, that doesn't mean it's better than a (subjectively) bad movie with reference A/V quality and hours of behind the scenes footage.

Regardless of how the official, or even user, reviewers (subjectively) like a movie, I think it's a terrible and unjust practice to diminish the product's score when the point is to show some objectivity for the actual disc itself. I see this inconsistency much more often from user reviews (especially the really bad ones that don't even provide any kind of detail or reasoning for their scores), but I would expect the "professionals" on this site to hold higher ethical standards for themselves and the reviews they write on such a frequent basis.