How MEANRANK works
Every rating site measures something slightly different and reports it on its own scale. IMDb is an audience out of 10. Rotten Tomatoes is two numbers — critics and audience — both percentages. Metacritic is a weighted critic score out of 100 alongside a user score out of 10. Letterboxd is out of 5. Asking which one is right is the wrong question. MEANRANK puts them on one scale and takes the average.
The mean score
Every rating is converted to 0–100 and averaged with equal weight: each rating counts once. A Letterboxd 4.5/5 becomes 90. An IMDb 9.2/10 becomes 92. A Tomatometer of 97% stays 97. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic each publish two ratings, one from critics and one from their audience, so each of those sites counts twice: once for each. Critics do not outrank audiences or the reverse. That is the entire point of the number: it is the one figure nobody's thumb is on.
A rating is left out of the average if it rests on too few votes to mean anything — a Criticker score built from three ratings tells you nothing, so it isn't allowed to move an average. Each platform has its own floor, because a hundred Metacritic critics and a hundred IMDb voters are not the same quantity of evidence. Where a source publishes a rating without a vote count, the rating still counts toward the average, but it adds nothing to how confident we are in it.
The highest score is first
Rankings are strict. Whatever sits at number one has the highest score on the axis that page is about, and the order down the page is the order of the numbers printed beside it. Nothing is re-weighted, promoted or held back, and we never sort by one figure while showing you another.
Votes decide one thing only: whether a title is eligible. A 9.6 built from thirty votes shouldn't beat The Godfather, and it doesn't — not because we push it down, but because it never clears the bar below. Whether there is enough evidence to rank a title at all is a question about the data. Whether a well-evidenced 89.6 really belongs above a 90.3 is a question about our taste, and that one isn't ours to answer.
What gets ranked, and what doesn't
A title needs at least three independent platforms and 5,000 total votes before it appears anywhere on the site as a ranked entry at all.
The main lists — Highest Rated Movies, Highest Rated TV Shows, and the per-platform versions of them — ask for more: 100,000 votes. Coming first on those is the strongest claim this site makes, and it should rest on something. A narrower list, one already limited to a country, a decade or a genre, keeps the lower bar, because it is drawn from a smaller pool and is answering a smaller question.
That is why a film can top Highest Rated Indian Movies without appearing in Highest Rated Movies. It isn't being marked down. Its score and its grade are the same on every page it appears on; it just isn't listed against titles that millions more people have weighed in on.
Everything below that line still has a page. Search for its full title and you will find it; you can link to it and see every rating we hold. It simply isn't ranked against titles we know far more about, and it isn't submitted to search engines. If a second and third source appear for it later, it promotes itself automatically.
This is a deliberate correction. An earlier version of this site published every title it held, including thousands that carried one rating and nothing else. That was bad for readers and it was penalised, correctly.
The grade
The letter beside each title — A+ down to F — is a band of the mean score, not a separate opinion. It uses the scale everyone already knows: 90 and above is A+, 80 is A, 70 is B, 60 is C, 50 is D, and below 50 is F.
Across the titles we rank that works out at under 1% A+, 13% A, 27% B, 26% C, 20% D and 14% F — very few at the top, a broad middle, and a real tail, which is what a grade is supposed to look like. An A+ is genuinely rare: fifty titles out of more than seven thousand. Titles rated by fewer than three platforms show no grade at all rather than a bad one, because a grade drawn from a single rating would be a guess wearing a uniform.
Where the numbers come from
- Ratings — IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes (Tomatometer and Popcornmeter), Metacritic (Metascore and user score), Letterboxd, RatingGraph, Criticker, AlloCiné, Douban, Kinopoisk and Google. IMDb's rating and vote count come from the data files IMDb publishes itself. Letterboxd, both Rotten Tomatoes meters, both Metacritic scores and AlloCiné are read from each title's own page on those sites, so what you see here is what they were showing when we last looked. RatingGraph and Criticker cannot be read automatically; those figures were collected by hand up to September 2026 and are shown as they were last collected, so they can be out of date. Trakt is read from each title's own page too, through a web browser, because its pages fill in their scores with JavaScript. Douban and Kinopoisk block automated reading from outside their own countries, so their figures are collected separately and can be out of date. Every title page says when its platform pages were last read, and any platform that can't be read automatically says so on its own row.
- Google ratings — see below.
- Descriptions — most are written for this site. Where one hasn't been written yet, the page shows the summary from The Movie Database (TMDB) instead, which TMDB's terms allow with the credit shown below.
- Awards — the accolades tables on Wikipedia, imported as individual nominations rather than a summary line. Each title page links to the article its awards came from.
- Platform links — identifiers published on Wikidata, so the link to a title's IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes or Letterboxd page is the real one and not a guess assembled from the title.
- Posters, cast and streaming availability — The Movie Database (TMDB).
Attribution
Some of the sources above ask to be credited in particular words. These are generated from the same register the site checks before it will serve advertising, so a source cannot be added to the code and left off this page.
- IMDb datasets — Information courtesy of IMDb (https://www.imdb.com). Used with permission.
- The Movie Database (TMDB) — This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
- JustWatch — Streaming availability from JustWatch.
- Wikidata — Identifier data from Wikidata, released under CC0.
- Wikipedia — Award data from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Google ratings
Google used to show a star rating beside films and shows in its search results, drawn from its own users. At some point it stopped. The ratings weren't archived anywhere public, and they are not in any API.
We collected roughly 6,900 of them while they were still being published. They are on this site because they are a real signal from an enormous, general audience — not film enthusiasts, not critics, just people who searched for a film — and that is a different population from every other platform here.
Two things follow, and both matter. Google no longer publishes them, so they cannot be looked up at source — whether any other archive holds the same snapshot we genuinely do not know, and we would rather say that than claim to be the only copy. And they are frozen: they reflect the moment they were captured and will never update, because there is nothing left to update them from. Every Google figure on this site should be read as a historical record rather than a current score, and that is why it is labelled wherever it appears.
What the numbers can't tell you
An average across platforms is not a measure of quality, and it would be dishonest to present it as one. It's worth knowing what it inherits:
- The audiences aren't the same. Letterboxd skews toward people who watch a lot of film. Metacritic's critic pool is small and largely Anglophone. Douban is overwhelmingly Chinese. A title can score differently on each because it is being watched by different people, not because one of them is wrong.
- Coverage is uneven. A 1974 film and a 2024 one rarely have the same number of sources, and older or non-English titles tend to have fewer. The eligibility bar keeps the thinnest cases out of rankings entirely; it does not level the ones that clear it.
- Ratings drift. Scores move after a re-release, an awards run, or a controversy. Ours are a snapshot, refreshed periodically, not a live feed.
- Review-bombing is real. Audience scores are sometimes pushed down deliberately. Averaging across platforms dilutes it, because a campaign rarely hits all of them at once — but it doesn't erase it.
What MEANRANK doesn't do
No placement on this site is for sale. A studio cannot buy a position in a ranking, a spot on a list, or a better grade — not now, and not if the site ever carries advertising, because the scores are computed from the ratings and there is no hand on the scale. No film or TV mean score is set by hand: it is computed by the same code from the same sources, and the handful of manual corrections that exist are for typos and mismatched titles, never for scores. Where a rating is missing, the page says so rather than filling the gap with an estimate.
Editorial lists
The curated lists make a different kind of argument. Their pages label each criterion as computed or editorial. Editorial scores are judgements, with reasons and any weights stated on the page. They do not change a title's platform ratings, mean score or place in the rating-based rankings.
Contact and corrections
If a title is wrong — a bad match, a stale rating, an award attributed to the wrong film — it's worth reporting, and it will be fixed. Reach us at [email protected]. Include the page's address; that's usually all it takes.