'What was relatively unusual is that the average rating between critics and movie-goers was so different. 'Prior to our research, what was shown is that critics agree highly, but no-one's ever looked at how critics correlate with regular people,' says Wallisch. The scientists compared everyone's scores with everyone else's in a pairwise manner, compared people to 29 professional film critics (like Roger Ebert) and compared individual scores from those groups with aggregated sources of reviews, including Rotten Tomatoes and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).

The data was collected over 10 years (2005-2015) via an online survey where participants were asked to rate every film they had seen and give each movie a star rating on a scale of 0 to 4 stars. Wallisch and Whritner gave almost 3000 people a list of over 200 popular films - major motion pictures released from 1985 to 2004 (including some in the Star Wars series). Their paper, entitled 'Strikingly Low Agreement in the Appraisal of Motion Pictures', also revealed that our preferences are often at odds with those of film critics. Those figures come from a 2017 study by Pascal Wallisch and perception researcher Jake Alden Whritner, which found that our taste in movies is highly idiosyncratic - they're peculiar to an individual.

The average agreement in scores among moviegoers is 26%, while the agreement between regular people and individual film critics is 27%. 'And there's some evidence, as you saw with Star Wars, that in some cases they're actually worse.' So is it generally true that critics won't predict whether you'll like a movie? 'Critics don't help you at all, they are not better than a randomly-picked person,' says Dr Pascal Wallisch, a psychologist at New York University. Another recent example is Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which was liked by only 27% of critics, but 63% of the public. It isn't even the first high-profile film to illustrate that the two groups frequently disagree. But it's wrong to suggest The Last Jedi is special.

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