Indian Hindi-language drama film, ‘The Kashmir Files’ is being received positively by the viewers and has given a phenomenal performance in the box office.
#TheKashmirFiles shows PHENOMENAL GROWTH… Grows 325.35% on Day 3 [vis-à-vis Day 1], NEW RECORD… Metros + mass belt, multiplexes + single screens, the *opening weekend biz* is TERRIFIC across the board… Fri 3.55 cr, Sat 8.50 cr, Sun 15.10 cr. Total: ₹ 27.15 cr. #India biz. pic.twitter.com/FsKN36sDCp
— taran adarsh (@taran_adarsh) March 14, 2022
Several state governments have also declared it tax-free. However, the movie’s IMBD rating has raised several eyebrows.
Earlier, the movie was given a 10/10 rating on the IMBD website which created confusion in the minds of viewers.
Through a thread of tweets, a Twitter user alleged that IMBD ratings can be manipulated.
Rejoicing an Indian film winning IMDB's GOAT rating?
As someone who studies these things, we only won the population war.
You can go watch Kashmir Files to confirm if it is the greatest film ever, or I can explain with data, if that does anything for you, why @IMDB is broken pic.twitter.com/4F2l49INhX
— joyojeet pal (@joyopal) March 13, 2022
Backing his claim with data, Joyojeet Pal wrote that the perfect rating puts the movie well above every iconic film ever made, e.g. ‘The Dark Knight’ and ‘The Godfather’.
Kashmir Files has a near total top end rating. Films don’t get rated as magnificent universally. Usually there is a spread of people who love, hate, and most importantly, have moderate opinions.
See for instance comparison with Godfather and Dark Night, high rated films on IMDB pic.twitter.com/iIXhyMveNp
— joyojeet pal (@joyopal) March 13, 2022
This places it well above every Indian film ever made. This also puts Vivek Agnihotri in the category of Coppola, Spielberg, Tarantino, Scorcese, Kurosawa among others whose films hit that note.
— joyojeet pal (@joyopal) March 13, 2022
This would lead to tampering with the credibility of the site that is often referred by people before investing their time in watching a movie.
There is precedence to this. Any film with Deepika Padukone, Swara Bhaskar, Alia Bhatt and a range of others not obsequious to, or with last names not preferred by the current political dispensation will have their films aggressively rated down on IMDB.
— joyojeet pal (@joyopal) March 13, 2022
Alleging the foul play in the rating of the movie, he said that earlier several South superstars in Tamil & Telugu cinema have benefitted with such beefing of their movie’s rating by ‘fans clubs and PR’.
This is not the first film to do this. South superstars in Tamil & Telugu cinema routinely benefit from fans clubs and PR systematically beefing up the ratings of their stars' films. This is arguably also true for fan activity driven ratings of media anywhere in the world
— joyojeet pal (@joyopal) March 13, 2022
Sharing screengrabs of some more facts, he wrote that those relying on IMDB must look at the “top 1000 voters” under the rating section.
If you MUST rely on IMDB, look at the "top 1000 voters" under the ratings section. This is almost always much lower than the general public rating.
The score, as well as the number of top 1000 who chose to watch the film matters.
Here is the rating for Asuran, a solid watch. pic.twitter.com/Mv2MvK6Hzf
— joyojeet pal (@joyopal) March 13, 2022
Sharing his understanding of how movie ratings work, he tweeted:
On this metric, the highest-rated Indian mainstream film this last year was Sardar Udham. In the last five years, only a handful of Indian films crossed this threshold — Kumbalangi Nights, Hindi Medium, Tumbadd, The Great Indian Kitchen, and Newton. These are all fantastic films
— joyojeet pal (@joyopal) March 13, 2022
Now, comparing ‘The Kashmir Files’ rating, he said that its top 1000 voter rating on IMBD is 1/10 while it had received 10 on 10 stars on the website.
It’s worth mentioning here that at the time of publishing this article only three Top 1000 voters have voted which is too low to assign any value to the Top 1000 metric.
Now back to Kashmir Files, its top 1000 voter rating on @imdb is…… 1/10. The lowest rating possible.
This in a nutshell is how the information environment, especially around major products with wide consumer uptake, is verifiably muddy in India. pic.twitter.com/wp5NDVU0Ea
— joyojeet pal (@joyopal) March 13, 2022
When we visited the website of IMBD, it stated that they have detected ‘unusual voting activity’ on the film. Hence, they applied an ‘alternate weighting calculation’ and dipped the rating to 8.3 stars.
Highlighting this unusual activity, people online claimed that the ratings are being influenced.
The actual mean is 9.6 (Bottom of the same page). Somebody has surely influenced the ratings because Jai Bhim, a propaganda movie is still at 9.4
Who forced them to dip the ratings of #TheKashmirFiles ? What's unusual voting activity? Isn't possible that every Indian rates 10*? pic.twitter.com/rnrg6YeCQQ— Homi Devang Kapoor (@Homidevang31) March 14, 2022
On noticing this change in the ratings, the director of the film Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri, called it ‘unusual and unethical’.
THIS IS UNUSUAL AND UNETHICAL. https://t.co/Iwcc7yQCGk
— Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri (@vivekagnihotri) March 14, 2022