How we score
One number, 0 to 100, from six independent signals. No editorial thumb on the scale, and no signal counted twice.
Two kinds of signal
Quality signals decide the number. These are what critics and audiences actually thought.
| Quality signal | Relative weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| IMDb rating | 40% | The broadest audience sample there is. |
| Rotten Tomatoes | 33% | Critic consensus, as a percentage. |
| TMDB rating | 27% | Shrunk toward the catalogue average until it has plenty of votes behind it (at 1,000 votes it counts for half), so a 9.4 from a few hundred people cannot outrank an 8.6 from twenty thousand. Ignored entirely below 50 votes. |
Context signals can only lift it. They close at most a quarter of the gap between the rating-based score and their own, and they never subtract: being obscure is not evidence of being bad. A popular title cannot buy its way into a tier its ratings do not support.
| Context signal | Relative weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Popularity | 40% of the lift | Log-scaled, so a runaway hit does not flatten everything else. |
| Netflix Top 10 | 40% of the lift | Number one is worth the most, number ten very little. |
| Recency | 20% of the lift | A small nudge for titles that genuinely just arrived or just came out. |
No rating, no score
If a title has no usable critic or audience rating, it gets no score at all. We would rather show "not rated yet" than manufacture a number out of how many people clicked on it. Missing signals are not held against a title either: weights are shared across whichever quality signals it does have, so a foreign film with no Rotten Tomatoes page can still rank near the top.
Tiers
| Tier | Score | Means |
|---|---|---|
| S | 88 and up | Essential. Near-unanimous across every source. |
| A | 78 to 87 | Excellent. Safe pick for most evenings. |
| B | 65 to 77 | Worth it. Good if the genre is your thing. |
| C | 50 to 64 | Mixed. The sources disagree with each other. |
| D | Below 50 | Skip it. The numbers are telling you something the trailer is not. |
Where availability comes from
We read TMDB's watch-provider data, which is sourced from JustWatch and licensed for this use. We check the catalogue daily and record the first day a title appears on a service and the day it disappears. That is how the just added and just left pages work: direct observation, not a republished list.
Where the writing comes from
Every number on this site is rendered straight out of our database. Article prose is drafted against a fact sheet built from that same database, and the drafting step is explicitly forbidden from introducing figures of its own. We do not read, summarise or rewrite other publishers' articles.
Reader score
Separate from the BN Score, and deliberately so. One vote per reader per title. Once a title has three or more votes, the reader score is what we publish as the on-page rating.