I have been a
loyal TOI reader since I was about ten. Since then, my daily routine has
revolved around reading the newspaper. I was also, in my school days, a TOI Young Journalist
for two years and fleetingly considered a career in journalism.
If you read a
paper for a decade and a half as I have (and
for several decades as have my parents) you grow addicted to it… you begin
to take it seriously. The newspaper business is all about loyalty. People will
tell you their breakfast/ tea didn’t go down that well if for whatever reason,
they could not grab hold of their favourite newspaper (which was, by the way,
a common occurrence during all my childhood vacations with my mother.)
Anyhow, back to
me. What I did, when I did not become a journalist, was to become an engineer
and an MBA. What that gave me in turn, was an introduction to several simple
yet powerful mathematical tools… some of which I will showcase here today…
I have been, for
some time, particularly pained by the disparity in TOI’s movie ratings versus
ratings by independent reviewers like Masand/ Anupama Chopra. From a point
where you could blindly trust TOI to rate a movie honestly, things have come to
such a head that you need to verify the TOI’s movie ratings with more
independent sources before making a movie-watching decision.
So here’s what I
did using the modicum of mathematics I remembered from my engineering and MBA
days. I painstakingly took down the ratings of 100 Hindi movies from TOI and
from IMDB in an excel and then, subtracted the IMDB Rating from TOI’s Rating to create a
dependent variable I shall call “Gap in Ratings”. I also googled extensively
for the movies’ production budgets (this
removed three movies from my data set whose budgets I could not find on Google:
Filmistaan, Rangrezz and O Teri). On top of this, I added an (econometric)
layer of whether the movie had a “bankable” star like one of the Khans (Saif
included), Amitabh Bacchan, Akshay, Ajay Devgan, etc... And then, I ran a linear
correlation and several regressions (going up to the power of seven), just to see if there was a pattern with
which the “Gap in Ratings” between TOI and IMDB varied.
Just a snapshot
of what the data looked like is here:
I found that
there was a 47% correlation between
the gap in movie ratings on TOI vs IMDB and the budget of a movie. Now what
that technically means is that 47% of the value of the variable “Gap in movie ratings on TOI vs IMDB” can be explained by the independent variable “Budget of
a movie” while the remaining 53% is determined by other factors. But 47% isn’t
really strong enough; there’s still 53% that’s explained by factors we do not statistically
understand (or haven’t accounted for).
What, however,
is infinitely more interesting is that if you take the average gap in ratings
between TOI and IMDB for movies with non bankable stars, it comes to +0.38 points on a scale of 10. However,
throw bankable stars into the mix and the average gap in ratings between TOI
and IMDB goes up to +1.11 on a scale of
10.
That’s a 190% jump in the average gap in ratings
between TOI and IMDB if a movie has a bankable star. Meaning, in non
mathematical terms, the disparity in ratings given by TOI vs IMDB on average goes up by 190% if the movie has a bankable star.
(For the record, I have counted the Khans
including Saif, Sanjay Dutt, Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgun, Hrithik, Ranbir, the
Deols and Emraan Hashmi as bankable stars… bankable stars, by definition, are
the marquee stars whose films always make money or are supposed to always make
money, anyway)
Since averages
can sometimes be skewed by a couple of data points, let us now look at medians.
So if you take the median gap in ratings between TOI and IMDB for movies with
non bankable stars, it comes to +0.2 points on a scale of 10. However, throw
bankable stars into the mix and the median gap in ratings between TOI and IMDB
goes up to +1.3 on a scale of 10.
That’s a whopping 550% jump in the median gap in
ratings between TOI and IMDB, if a movie has a bankable star. Meaning, in non
mathematical terms, the disparity in ratings given by TOI vs IMDB at the median goes up by 550% if the movie has a bankable star.
Another
interesting fact – if you look at movies with bankable stars, the minimum
rating TOI has given (for the 97 movie data set going back a couple of years) is 2 (out of 5) whereas the least rating for a movie
with a bankable star on IMDB is 0.85 (out of 5).
That’s a 135% higher minimum review, seemingly guaranteed,
by the TOI.
Since numbers
cannot lie, it is highly likely that the rumours doing the rounds in media
circles are true and TOI actually charges money for maintaining a minimum
guaranteed review. Consider this – Humshakals,
a movie panned universally by almost all critics, got three stars from TOI. Himmatwala
got 2.5, as did ‘The XPose’ and Rangrezz – all movies which were
universally buried by the rest of the movie critic universe. The list goes on and if you are
really interested in doing your own data analysis or going through my numbers, reach out to me at vaibhavrainmaker@gmail.com.
So where does
this take us?
One – TOI is
most likely on the take whenever there is a big budget movie with a big star involved
to give them a Minimum Review of at least 2.5 or 3. If the movie is terribly
terribly terribly terrible, the Minimum Review guarantee falls to 2 (eg: Chatur
Singh).
Two – if the
movie has a bankable star, just shave off 0.55 points off TOI’s review from a
statistical point of view to arrive at its actual watchability potential.
And, dear Times
of India, if you are reading this, you just lost a loyal reader.
PS: Data analysis done on 97 hindi movies with
available budgets. 41 of these had “bankable” stars.
