I just read the linked article about the worst movie on IMDb (as of May 1st). The movie is called Gunday (here’s the IMDb link). As the story goes, Gunday’s low rating is the result of a marketing misstep and not a true indicator of it’s aesthetic or enjoyability:

“Gunday,” which came out of the huge Bollywood studio Yash Raj Films in February, isn’t that bad. There are a few large plot holes and unconvincing character motivations, but the dance sequences are top-notch, the costumes are fun, and Irrfan Khan’s portrayal of a world-weary policeman is as good as his fans have come to expect. In India, it’s the top-grossing February movie in Bollywood history. The New York Times’ Rachel Saltz ended her review of “Gunday” by calling it “downright enjoyable.” RogerEbert.com gave it three out of four stars. Variety called it “a boisterous and entertaining period crime drama.”

But the film made a misstep that has doomed it to the bottom of the IMDb pile. “Gunday” offended a huge, sensitive, organized and social-media-savvy group of people who were encouraged to mobilize to protest the movie by giving it the lowest rating possible on IMDb. Of “Gunday’s” ratings, 36,000 came from outside the U.S., and 91 percent of all reviewers gave it one star. The next lowest-rated movie on IMDb — 1.8 stars overall — has a more even distribution of ratings, with only 71 percent of reviewers giving it one star. The evidence suggests the push to down-vote “Gunday” was successful, and that shows just how vulnerable data can be, especially when it’s crowdsourced.

And this is the problem with crowd-sourced sites like IMDb. Is it fair to change even one “1 star” review in this system? Do you mark the movie with an asterisk to let people know that there might be something fishy with the data?

This is the nature of allowing people to vote. Some votes are votes of protest. Some people value cinematography above all else. Others accentuate plot. In this case, voters value a specific political point. Bumps in the data make crowd-sourcing interesting and, perhaps, less dependable.

Personally, I get a little thrill every time I find a little gold nugget of a movie that I really love but which is poorly rated on crowd sourced sites. One of my favorite examples is The Big Picture, directed by Christopher Guest and starring Kevin Bacon with some great cameos by Martin Short, John Cleese, Richard Belzer, and others. The Big Picture spent most of its life rated in the high fives or low sixes, but I found it incredibly enjoyable.

Your mileage may vary. And that’s the beauty of it.