Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Film

@Erik has been adding a new "Metacritic review breakdown" to articles about recent films. Testing for a possible template is at User:Erik/Metacritic review breakdown. If Erik or anyone else wants to talk about it I've opened this. RanDom 404 (talk) 23:56, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

I was experimenting in a few articles and was not quite aiming to make it universal. I don't think the breakdown has to be used everywhere, but it could be good for articles where there is a fair mix of two or three categories. Plus, Metacritic actually has a proprietary weighing system where it favors some publications more than others and does not disclose which ones it weighs. So that means there could be "mixed or average" proprietary conclusions when the breakdown actually shows more positive reviews than mixed. Metacritic, along with Rotten Tomatoes, are at their core commercial services, so we shouldn't parrot them but instead use the data points they provide as best as we can for an encyclopedic presentation.

It appears that Beland created a template based on one of my instances: Template:Metacritic breakdown. I have no problem with this but again, I don't aim for this to be universally deployed. We should add to template documentation some suggestions for when it is good to use it and when it is not (e.g., like when the score is high and all reviews are positive, a breakdown is not that helpful). Ultimately, though, I think it is a decent visual aid. Erik (talk | contrib) 18:58, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

I encourage you to add to the documentation directly at Template:Metacritic breakdown/doc. -- Beland (talk) 19:18, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

I honestly do not see the point of just Metacritic when the site is not the best for films in particular. That would be Rotten Tomatoes. As proof, every film article out there discusses first the approval rating and consensus of Rotten Tomatoes, not the reception on Metacritic. Its inclusion seems extremely trivial and too distracting. It makes the Reception section too clunky. In the case of articles of films, prose is just fine without any other charts, tables or visual elements. I thought we had this discussion before and we were done with ratings tables. A consensus was reached a while ago. I apologize but this does not add anything of value to the section. Joy040207 (talk) 22:11, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

This feels like it is putting WP:UNDUEWEIGHT on the metacritic data and isn't conveying anything that the standard prose doesn't already. - adamstom97 (talk) 09:46, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

It is conveying a distribution of reviews across categories, which is not covered in the standard prose. I don't think it needs to be used everywhere, but it is useful for showing distributions beyond what a commercial platform has upfront. It's like how we tried to show Rotten Tomatoes average scores before they took that away. I put in the documentation some guidance about when it is not needed and when it can help. Rotten Tomatoes is problematic in itself because a review is only ever positive or negative, and the Metacritic details are more appropriate from an encyclopedic perspective. Erik (talk | contrib) 14:26, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Reviewing the other thread, I removed the template from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri because like the documentation says, the template is not of additional value. (Plus, the editor got blocked.) I do think Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is a good example of its use because like I said above, Rotten Tomatoes is problematic in being simplistic, with everything flattened into one score (especially with the average score now removed). That's why we have had both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. While RT is simplistic, MC is proprietary with its metascore. We should not merely parrot these review aggregators and, on this encyclopedia, always contextualize what each one is doing. If RT had public scores for all individual reviews visualized, that would be a great and more accurate display to have here. Metacritic comes closest to that. For Ready or Not 2, it shows the buckets into which reviews fall, and that it is not predominantly positive or predominantly mixed. Erik (talk | contrib) 14:44, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Pinging Abskiee who appears to have added the template in some articles. I don't know if they're simply repeating what they've seen used, or if they see additional value in using this. Erik (talk | contrib) 15:06, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

I could see it making sense to include a footnote that explains the underlying data that led to Metacritic's weighted average, that would provide the data to the user without putting so much undue weight on it. - adamstom97 (talk) 15:25, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Before I even experimented with this, I was already writing the Metacritic prose to indicate the breakdown of reviews across categories. If anything, indicating the breakdown in text or bar graph indicates the expected WP:PROPORTION of sampled reviews in the text after the review aggregators. With RT and MC's overall scores, we have no guidance on how many reviews of various categories to sample. In the past, even before including the breakdown, I had balanced sampling for critical reception sections based on the Metacritic distribution. So if anything, it's a WP:DUE guidepost. Erik (talk | contrib) 15:31, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

I still do not see a need to disclose how many positive or negative reviews a movie had on MC. Seems a bit disingenuous to use it as a "better" source when it is has way less presence and notability in the film industry than RT. Look at Goat (2026) for example. On RT, 83 reviews were submitted, Metacritic? Only 16. Why do we need a whole table explaining that only "9" were positive, only "6" mixed and "1" negative. It is undue weight, the way I see it. Too much emphasis. Joy040207 (talk) 22:19, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

I agree with you that a table is overkill, but Erik is correct about Metacritic capturing the spread of critical opinion better than Rotten Tomatoes. In any statistical measure, there are two important pieces of informant: the mean, and the standard deviation. For example, if a film gets a score of 60 it is not immediately clear if that derives from a lot of average scores (i.e. this is an average movie) or whether it is a film that polarized critical opinion (lots of good and poor reviews). Given that Metacritic reviews often overlap with RT reviews, then the Metacritic breakdown also provides insight into how the RT score is constructed too. IMO, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are good at different things: RT offers a more comprehensive score, but Metacritic offers a more nuanced interpretation of the data—both are important to summarizing the critical reception. Betty Logan (talk) 15:56, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Joy040207 and others, I think we should consider a few things:

1. Rotten Tomatoes being the most popular does not equal it being the best. At the end of the day, it is a commercial product, so we need to follow WP:PROMO in referencing it responsibly.
2. In a perfect world, we would want a secondary source that studies a set of reviews and reports in prose the general reception and the trends within. For more famous films, books writing about them in retrospect often do this. Unfortunately, most films come and go, so we do not have this. In that absence, Rotten Tomatoes is unfortunately the most available go-to. It's not even designed to "study" reviews, it's set up to tell moviegoers if a movie is worth going to, determining thumbs-up and thumbs-down in aggregate. Wikipedia cannot and should not replicate that directly. We should try to get the appropriate encyclopedic value out of such sources, like the Rotten Tomatoes average rating was more appropriate than the main percentage.
3. As Betty said, Metacritic captures the spread. If we plan to write a full critical reception section, Rotten Tomatoes cannot help at all with applying the right WP:PROPORTION of reviews. Metacritic's metascore does not help either, but its breakdown does. As I said above, it is like a WP:DUE guidepost where it makes sense why reviews in a section are balanced the way they are.
4. I reviewed the ratings-table discussion, and that table is different from this template. That table involved only the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic overall scores as well as individual reviews. I agree that such a table does not work because the overall scores are presented without context, and the individual reviews would be cherry-picked. The breakdown template actually provides more context (e.g., the spread). Technically, for Rotten Tomatoes, it could also exist as a pie chart, but considering the commercial-oriented binary approach, showing percentages of positive vs. negative reviews perpetuates that oversimplified "calculation".
5. Regarding Goat, I think it's a valid point that there are not many reviews for it. I don't know what a reasonable number can be, in this context. 30, which is a common sample size? Rotten Tomatoes having many more reviews can be good, but especially without the average rating, more reviews does not help provide an encyclopedic answer for how a film was received.
6. To re-emphasize, I don't think this should be used everywhere. I think there are reasonable cases for showing the spread to reflect the proper complexity of the overall reception. Barring secondary sources for #2, we have no WP:BESTSOURCES way to do an encyclopedically sound job of reporting most films' critical receptions. (Per MOS:FILMCRITICS, we want "detailed commentary regarding the critics' consensus", which is not available for many films.) In that absence, the breakdown, along with the review-aggregator scores, provides a more well-rounded picture of the film where applicable.

Thanks, Erik (talk | contrib) 14:08, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

I don't disagree that Metacritic is a good tool for us to use, and the spread of reviews can be helpful when building a critical response section, but that doesn't mean we should present it to readers as the most important part of a film's critical response. When I pushed back on displaying this breakdown above, I was not pushing back on using it in the way that you have been discussing, and I believe other users feel the same. I am just against displaying it in a table. You are taking data that is not widely reported on by reliable sources, that is not even prominently presented by the source itself, and displaying it as more prominent than any other critical response data in a given section. This feels like a blatant example of Wikipedia overstepping. We could have had the same discussion about the old Rotten Tomatoes average rating, which was always more indicative of overall critical opinions than the positive/negative percentage. Just because I believe it was better does not mean I think we should have had a table or quote box prominently displaying it as more important than other response data. I have no problem using the Metacritic breakdown to structure the response section, recording it in hidden notes or talk page discussions, and even including it in prose or as an explanatory footnote. But I don't think it is appropriate to display it prominently in a table like this. - adamstom97 (talk) 14:54, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

I came across one of these tables myself over the weekend, and I think I share adamstorm's concerns, in that regardless of whether the underlying data is accurate or reliable, presenting it as a chart is inevitably going to draw the reader's eye to it, and presenting only the MC data in this way implies that Wikipedia places some emphasis on its importance, just as some readers and editors feel that data provided in an infobox is considered more important than data that is deemed inappropriate for an infobox. Basically, it's optics. DonIago (talk) 19:48, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

I would completely support visualizing RT data if it existed. A visualized spread of reviews would be great too. But we've seen RT get worse over time. Years ago, they had a Top Critics percent that we used for a while. (You can see that we still have old language in the MOS for that.) Now we lost the average rating for it, so it's just the percent. It's not like we have spread options from both, and MC is being favored over RT. RT just has nothing beyond the percent.

I don't think we can separate data and optics. We often include RT and MC in most articles because we largely don't have anything better, not because we consider them gold standards that we're proud to have. If a film gets supremely excellent coverage in terms of critical reception, then RT and MC are not as needed. They can be relegated lower, or for older films, removed entirely. They're commercial services that we are stuck with using for most films. Ideally, we want to lead with "detailed commentary from reliable sources regarding the critics' consensus" when we can, so RT and MC are perpetual placeholders.

But of the two, MC is more statistically reliable for the scope of this encyclopedia, as discussed above. To apply reliability further, while both aggregate reviews, MC's reviews are reliable sources that we would reference in Wikipedia articles. Most of what RT aggregates would not be reliable for use. So it's literally a spread of how reliable sources have received a film. Erik (talk | contrib) 18:49, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Beland, as the creator of the template, did you have any thoughts? Erik (talk | contrib) 18:52, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

I have no strong opinion on the merits of graphing these stats. My main purpose in creating the template was to simplify editing and remove a large amount of repetitive HTML from article wikitext. -- Beland (talk) 19:03, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Is there an example of where all this information was included as text prior to this template? I can't say I saw this data for Metacritic displayed frequently as text. I also want to chime in that I agree with Adam and other's thoughts that while I understand the template's purpose, I don't agree with it's use and being displayed in articles as it give too much weight to Metacritic as a critical response whole in the section. Especially where some of these pages that use it only have a handful of actual reviews included. I'd much rather see the reviewer content/summary sentences from round up article rather than this table. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 20:48, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

I also agree with adamsom97's points. Exactly my points, that it seems unnecessary to give it extra emphasis to just the Metacritic scores.

By the way, I am proposing to stop the addition of new tables in articles until we get a consensus. Joy040207 (talk) 17:14, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

I'm fine to not include the box in all films, but I think it's a helpful visual aide that makes sense to include when there is contentious or mixed reception. And, fwiw, RT is very liberal with who they count as a reviewer, while MC generally restricts their to quote-unquote prestige critics/people who would be considered RS's under other circumstances. Fiendpie (talk) 20:04, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

If possible could someone join the discussion at Talk:Shawn Fedorchuk, regarding whether claims linking the subject to the pseudonym "Lucifer Valentine." I have the concern that even mentioning the allegation or rumor, without solid sourcing, may constitute harassment (WP:BLP, WP:UNDUE, WP:HA) Issac I Navarro (talk) 14:41, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Per title. Darkwarriorblake (talk) 16:38, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Commented. TompaDompa (talk) 17:13, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Yes, yes, I suppose this might have been discussed here before, but... Stothart is given credit in that infobox since he won for the film's score BUT Harold Arlen is who wrote the songs and Arlen doesn't get mentioned at all in the infobox. The issue has come up today on the film's talk page and I agree with that post...doesn't seem quite right to me to exclude the songwriter Harold Arlen from the infobox. Let's discuss etc. - Shearonink (talk) 18:58, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

See WP:TALKFORK. Please respond at the article's talk page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:15, 25 March 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for being so thorough about the WP:TALKFORKing Jonesy95. - Shearonink (talk) 21:07, 25 March 2026 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:The Tale of Soldier Fedot, The Daring Fellow#Requested move 15 March 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. TarnishedPath^talk 08:42, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Bharathan (1992 film)#Requested move 10 March 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. TarnishedPath^talk 10:19, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

Does anyone know when The Numbers box office franchise tables will be back up? i.e MCU , Jurassic Park

They got removed due the The Numbers website redesign. I ask because if they will not be back up I'm not what to replace them with at List of highest-grossing media franchises, Jurassic_Park_(franchise)#Box_office_performance, etc Timur9008 (talk) 10:17, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

Wow, when did that happen? They have dropped a load of data; we use their data on the List of box-office bombs too. Let's hope it's back up soon. If not, the existing data can be recovered through the Wayback Machine. Betty Logan (talk) 10:21, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

It happened last month. 2-3 weeks ago when the redesign happened. Timur9008 (talk) 10:27, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

That's concerning. Much like what Betty Logan brought up above, we rely heavily on their data for List of fastest-grossing films too, and that doesn't seem to be accessible right now. Might be able to use Box Office Mojo if it doesn't get resolved, I suppose. TompaDompa (talk) 14:29, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Some stuff is back but not everything. Timur9008 (talk) 09:57, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Someone like You (2001 film)#Requested move 17 March 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. TarnishedPath^talk 12:39, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:How to Train Your Dragon 2#Requested move 2 April 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. -- Alex _talk 04:40, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Hold onto Me#Requested move that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Qwerty123M (talk) 05:45, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:12 Angry Men (1957 film)#Requested move 12 March 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. TarnishedPath^talk 08:41, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Retirement Plan (film)#Requested move 8 March 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. TarnishedPath^talk 10:35, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Where is Mama#Requested move 13 March 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. TarnishedPath^talk 05:13, 4 April 2026 (UTC)

There are two RfCs regarding Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Editors are invited to comment: Talk:Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri § RFC on mixed reviews in the lead, and below it. Thanks, Erik (talk | contrib) 17:59, 5 April 2026 (UTC)

If you have an opinion, please join. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:40, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:58th#Requested move 30 March 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. TarnishedPath^talk 08:13, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

Hi,

I’ve raised a sourcing-based question regarding choreography credits on The Greatest Showman Talk page and would appreciate input from editors here.

The discussion is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Greatest_Showman#Additional_choreography_credit_clarification

Thanks in advance. ChoreoResearch (talk) 02:44, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

I have nominated E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (album) for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the featured article criteria, or help improve the article. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" in regard to the article's featured status (see review instructions). Kinnimeyu (talk) 05:41, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

An editor has requested that Wizard of the Saddle be moved to Wizard of the Saddle (film), which may be of interest to this WikiProject. You are invited to participate in the move discussion. Hog Farm _Talk 15:34, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

Hi. An editor is going round film articles changing them to the format <year><country> film by <director>, i.e. "2019 Indian film by Karan Johar", and removing things like genres. Is there a standard for these? Thanks, Black Kite (talk) 15:30, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Rule of thumb is to keep it concise. Adding genres/country is probably not the best approach since that seems to be regularly contested in film articles. Mike Allen 15:35, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Fair enough, thanks. Black Kite (talk) 09:17, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#Survey: Firstpost: This is an RfC here regarding Firstpost which is listed as generally reliable at WP:ICTFSOURCES (Indian Cinema Task Force). Gotitbro (talk) 16:19, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Hi all. There is a debate open at User talk:~2026-19304-32#April 2026 regarding verifiability of publications and there usage on Wikipedia on the article for any Pakistani film. Anyone is welcome to participate, thank you! M. Billoo 03:29, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Kathanar – The Wild Sorcerer#Requested move 28 March 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. TarnishedPath^talk 04:41, 12 April 2026 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Exit 8 (film)#Requested move 9 April 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. silviaASH (inquire within) 14:37, 12 April 2026 (UTC)

Beauty and the Beast (1991 film) has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 22:47, 12 April 2026 (UTC)