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What Is GoodScore and Why Should You Trust It?

February 07, 2026 4 min read

Every rating platform has bias. IMDb skews toward popular blockbusters. Rotten Tomatoes has the binary fresh/rotten problem. Metacritic overweights a few critics. TMDB reflects a global, younger audience.

GoodScore fixes this by combining all four.

How GoodScore Is Calculated

GoodScore is a composite rating on a 0-100 scale. Here's the weight distribution:

IMDb Rating 35%
Rotten Tomatoes Critics 25%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience 15%
Metacritic Score 15%
TMDB Rating 10%

Why These Weights?

IMDb (35%) has the largest user base and the most data points — over 2 million votes for top films. It's the most "democratic" rating, but it can be gamed and skews young/male.

Rotten Tomatoes Critics (25%) represents professional assessment. The Tomatometer tells you what percentage of critics gave a positive review — a good signal for baseline quality.

RT Audience (15%) balances the critics. Sometimes critics and audiences disagree wildly — this captures the audience perspective.

Metacritic (15%) uses weighted averages from top publications. It's the most "curated" score and often the harshest, which helps filter out crowd-pleasers that lack substance.

TMDB (10%) reflects a more international, tech-savvy audience. Lower weight because of smaller vote counts, but useful for capturing global taste.

Confidence Dampening

A movie with 5 votes and a 10/10 rating isn't better than a movie with 500,000 votes and a 8.5/10. GoodScore includes confidence dampening — movies with fewer votes are pulled slightly toward the average, preventing obscure titles from gaming the system.

What's a Good GoodScore?

80+ Exceptional — universally acclaimed
65-79 Great — well worth watching
50-64 Decent — enjoyable but flawed
<50 Below average — proceed with caution

Every movie page on GoodWatch shows the full GoodScore breakdown — so you can see exactly where the rating comes from and make your own call.

Stop scrolling. Start watching.

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