Film ratings at IMDb

i see IMDb average scores like this in terms of wide opinion on IMDb...

4.x/10 and less = crap (Showgirls is the only exception for me)
5.x/10 = generally negative opinions
6.x/10 = mixed opinions (could be slightly more positive or negative depending on which side of the 6's it's on)
7.x/10 = generally positive opinions

higher 7's and higher = the more praised movies

although... sometimes some movies are skewed a bit too high though but that's usually with movies that attract a ton of teenagers and the like as with those types of movies many of them get overpraised.

but with all of that said... i know my own tastes in movies well enough to get a geneeral feel of how a movie will turn out prior to seeing it mostly based on... subject matter/cast/director/trailer. sometimes some of those (director/cast) won't be a factor in which case it mostly comes back the subject matter and my impression from a trailer. that and i go into the vast majority of movies i see knowing it's likely going to be a 5/10(Thumbs Down (my most common rating which is usually alright enough to see once but has no re-watch appeal)) or a 6/10 (a mild Thumbs Up) for me.

so given that info... about the only time a movies average rating has a effect on me is when i am on the edge of seeing or not seeing a movie based on my own judgement (given mainly those four things i described above). but this does not happen much.

p.s. only 200 movies (out of the 2,025+ total) managed to score a 7 or higher out of the 2,025+ total movies i have seen. i don't restrict ratings just to restrict them, it's simply that the vast majority of movies simply are not enjoyable to a higher degree is all and i rate accordingly.

I don`t pay attention to ratings.

Yeah, that's my main problem.

it seems many don't use the rating scale properly as 5/10 should be middle-of-the-road/average and then scale up and down fairly evenly from there, especially on the more positive score ranges which i see as a 6 and higher where as a 5 and lower i see as the negative score brackets with a 5 being usually decent enough to watch once but since it's got not re-watch appeal for me it's ultimately a negative score.

most movies i see are a 5/10 followed by a 6/10 which is roughly where 70% of everything i have seen lands on one of those two scores. but with that said... i am confident had i seen some of the movies i scored a 5/10 years ago would likely score even less had i seen then more recently but obviously i am not going to waste my time re-watching average (or weaker) range movies.

but with that said... it seems like many routinely hand out 7's/8's/9's/10's on IMDb which skews ratings a bit too high. or they will simply overscore a movie if they like it and then score a movie really low if they don't care for it. also, you can tell some movies are definitely not scored right because while i understand peoples taste vary in movies, and that's fine, i just can't see just about every fairly known or known movie scoring a 1/10 or 10/10 as the vast majority of fairly well known movies are not THAT bad or THAT good.

i could understand for someone just starting off watching movies (or has not seen many) it will be harder for them to rate movies properly simply because they don't really have much to reference the movie experience to. but once you have seen plenty of movies you can tell what really stands out for you to a high degree vs what's does not and so on. like you can just tell where things land given your overall enjoyment or lack of enjoyment of them.

p.s. to state the obvious... i ultimately rate movies based on how much i enjoy watching them and the further they get away from that the lower the score.

This is why the boards were a better indicator than the scores or even reviews. A number doesn't tell me anything about the film and some of the reviews are written by obvious fans or people who look at films differently than I do and will go on and on about how superb the lighting or directing was for example while ignoring the terrible story line and acting.

So by reading the boards I could get a sense as to what pissed people off about the film and what they liked and then I could go from there with that information.

But to answer the question. No, I don't trust the scores as it is pretty obvious it was being dictated to by the studios.

You won't be the only one and that is why the ratings will become unreliable.  Not that I care after what they are doing.  I'll just use Metacritc for now on.