Just wondering how often, if at all MetaCritic decides to re-work its confidential weighting scheme as well as which critics should be included?

Just got out of "Sky Captain..." a few minutes ago, couldn't believe how bad it was (as the majority of "real" people commented on), and not only do I see a positive "65" Metacritic" score, but I see Ebert gives it a "100"? Something is definitely wrong! Ditto for "The Manchurian Candidate" receiving a very high MetaCritic score, and was an absolute waste. If you have to keep Ebert in for the prestige of having the guy, I hope he's given minimal weighting, as he inflates all scores.

Listen, I truly think this is the best movie review site on the web, and conceptually, I completely agree with what you do. But any thoughts about modifying "the secret sauce"?

asc85,

We do occasionally tinker with our publication list and our weightings, but not very often. As our library of movies grows, we want to make sure that our users can fairly compare movies from different eras without having to worry too much about the fact that different critics and different weightings are being utilized. So yes, we do subtle tinkering, but nothing huge.

As you mention, the best checks on the critics are the user reviews and the box office. Hopefully, with each of those three factors at your disposal, you'll be able to make a solid judgment on what to see.

Oh, and hopefully we've helped familiarize you with each of the individual critics we feature, such as Ebert. If you haven't seen them, we have individual pages devoted to each critic in the film section which helps to illustrate how each of them scores compared to the rest of the bunch.

Anyway, thanks for using and for your feedback....

MGE

I totally loved Sky Captain of the World,

but yes you should be careful when you take in the whole metacritic score. You should find critics you agree with taste wise and see how they graded it.

Maybe one day metacritic will be able to provide meta scores based on the critics you do like, but in the meantime, you have to take in the whole meta score or look at the critic scores individually.

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and Ebert may have given Sky Captain a high score because of his great love for Dark City, which some people compare this movie to

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