I would like to use 'Advanced Search' on allmovie.com to find new movies to see in the cinema, but it takes forever to be updated with recent ratings. At the moment, it seems no movies from 2024 rated 4 stars or up can be found at all. Would it be very complicated for you to update this database weekly, say, instead of uh... a couple times a year?
We're actively working on updates to the AllMovie data set.
Hopefully these changes will resolve what you are seeing.
Cheers!
Any news on when the site will be up and running again? :)
It should be available currently.
Are you not able to access AllMovie?
I can access it, but in my browser, at least, all movies are rated 3 stars, and I haven't seen any new reviews appearing, which isn't enhancing my user experience. :)
The site is running as expected.
We've needed to move over to a different data provider which has a different rating system and unfortunately does not supply movie reviews. More detail is here: https://www.allmovie.com/blog/post/an-evolving-allmovie
Holy shit, this site has been my guide in the world of film for two decades, and one day to the next, you just remove all of its content??
I appreciate your longtime loyalty to the great data we provided to you over the years and I understand your disappointment.
Unfortunately the expense of licensing the original data we used to display went up to the point where we are unable to display that information anymore.
We found another data source that has some additional data elements but does not have reviews.
We worked for many years to maintain things as they were, and we explored every possible avenue to continue but it was not possible to keep the original data source.
Two questions:
(1) Are these data, reviews especially, still available elsewhere?
(2) On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely is it that allmusic.com will go down the same road?
You can still find many of the same reviews we were licencing available here: https://www.tvguide.com/movies/aquaman-and-the-lost-kingdom/review/2030506350/
As far as AllMusic goes, we're doing everything within our power to try to ensure it doesn't undergo the same fate.
As a publisher of a website that focuses on music criticism, the news of Pitchfork being folded into the umbrella of their fellow Conde Nast property GQ was on one hand shocking, but on the other hand not surprising. Couple that with the news of Sports Illustrated having lots of confusing issues with licensing between Authentic and Arena resulting in potentially massive/complete layoffs of their (unionized) staff of writers. This follows a 2023 when the mastheads for BuzzFeed News, Gawker, and Jezebel closed up shop.
Times is hard for online publications, particularly ones that are ad-supported.
If you felt like it, you could subscribe to AllMusic for the low price of $12 a year. It removes all of the ads, makes the site run a ton faster, and helps support a longtime resource that millions of people trust and rely on. https://www.allmusic.com/subscribe
I may be wrong about this, but I feel many magnificent publications with dedicated user bases have made the mistake of 'selling out' to large corporations who said 'we'll do the servers and the marketing and accounting and you just focus on the creative stuff you do best', only now to be sacrificed to the unlimited greed of corporations who couldn't care less about the decades of hard work they're wiping away. (And of course, Google and Meta hovering up all the ad revenue doesn't help either.) Such a shame. I wonder what they're going to feed their AI's when no good writers remain.
Have you considered putting a counter on the website saying 'we need this many subscribers to keep the site going, reviews and all'? I'm sure many users had no idea you were in such a bad state, but you might be surprised at the number of people willing to pitch in if they'd have known all of this was about to disappear.
It's mainly the star ratings I'm after. Do you know if they are still available anywhere else? (Even the rather mysteriously appearing star ratings without a written review were often spot-on.)
And could you perhaps explain what is the idea behind this new 'IVA rating' you've got on the site now? It seems distinctly odd.
Essentially, a lot of this information is now simply gone from the internet, no? tvguide.com doesn't have star ratings, and it probably has only a fraction of the movies found on allmovie.com. If only I could get at least a list of all movies that had been rated 4.5 or 5 stars... But even archive.org can't help with that...
Here is some detail about the rating system we're now displaying on the site:
Fabric Origin has created its rating system to help us sort content and show you what they see as best. They do this by looking at several factors such as contributors to a title and their past successes, box office performance, awards, countries it is opening in, marketing push for that title, trailer plays, social media presence, and more. If a movie is currently in a theatrical run, you might see a lower number until more marketing materials are made available and it starts having box office numbers and later awards.
Yeah, this is essentially useless, just look at the filmography of any notable director... (You now have a total of 38 movies rated 5 stars and about 100 rated 4.5. And they're hardly the ones you'd expect.) Plus all new movies now appear to be rated 3-ish stars by default, for reasons explained by the blurb you've shared.
Couldn't you pay some of the old hands who once started the site to provide star ratings at least - you know, like the old days? Wouldn't that be many times less expensive than the TiVo license you no longer pay? This new rating you're paying for must be made by some dumb algoritm - I'm sure even chatGPT would do better...
Something I've long been wondering about: there would often be star ratings appearing on the site without a written review, and the sometimes quite obscure new movies and documentaries that were highly rated in this way were often excellent. Were those coming from TiVo as well, or was that an allmovie.com thing?
I don't mean to be annoying, but I frankly think you'd be better off without star ratings than using this one. It's infuriatingly inappropriate, in my opinion.
Metacritic requires a license for commercial implementations. We looked into their terms and found that we couldn't agree to their requirements with our current staffing and budgetary constraints.
Something I've always been wondering about was where the star ratings without reviews came from. Every year, there were two dozen movies or so that didn't get reviewed, but did get 4.5 stars or even 5, and they were often really good. For old time's sake, how did these come about? :)
It always took a shorter amount of editorial time to assign a rating than it took to write, edit and copyedit a full review. In those occasions, a rating might have been added but a full review might not have been prioritized.
It always felt as if one or more people working for the website were just saying 'hey, I've seen this great movie or documentary recently', since they were rarely the really obvious things to be reviewed. :) I wish we could just have that back, some knowledgeable people going through and giving star ratings to everything, even if no one's writing reviews anymore, instead of these nonsensical algorithmic ratings. :)
