Methodology

The Balasaur Score is a 0 to 100 blend of ratings from IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and TMDB. When a source has no rating for a title, the other sources split its weight in proportion to their own. These are the weights.

A title shows a score when it has ratings from at least two sources and 10 TMDB votes. A title rated by one source shows a score only with 500 or more TMDB votes, and the score is that rating on a 0 to 100 scale: a TMDB 7.8 scores 78.

TMDB rates almost every title that has a rating at all, so a title rated by just one of IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic usually still has the two sources a score needs.

A worked example. Inception holds 8.8 on IMDb, 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, 74 on Metacritic and 8.4 on TMDB. The two ten-point ratings become 88 and 84, then (88 times 0.25 plus 86 times 0.125 plus 74 times 0.125 plus 84 times 0.10) divided by 0.60 gives 84.

A list is published only when enough titles qualify for it.

A title qualifies with a poster, a synopsis, a score and at least 25 TMDB votes, and is left out if it is adult or sexually suggestive. Trailers, holiday and reunion specials, talk and reality shows, and films under 40 minutes never make a list.

A title with few votes needs a higher score to make a list, so a handful of perfect ratings cannot carry it. On the list, titles are ordered by Balasaur Score alone.

A list ends where its quality falls off. Every list keeps at least its top 12, no title makes the page scoring more than 25 points behind that list's leader, and no list runs past 60.

Each title's ratings and streaming services are re-checked from TMDB and OMDb on a rolling cycle, oldest first. In the last 24 hours 12,041 titles were re-checked, and every title has been checked within the last 28 days.

Lists are rebuilt every night from the latest scores. The date on a list is the last day its titles or their order changed. Lists by country, such as The Best Japanese Movies, carry no date, because they are worked out from current scores when the page loads rather than in the nightly rebuild.

No one pays for a place on a list, and there are no sponsored placements. No language model writes the text on title or list pages; synopses come from TMDB. Data comes from TMDB, OMDb and JustWatch.