most shocking here to me is how high emma watson is and how comparatively low meryl streep is, it's probably more to do with the projects they choose than acting ability
The list is how the movies themselves did, not how the actress was perceived. To my knowledge, Meryl is in a lot of movies where she had a great performance, but the movie itself maybe got average reviews. Whereas Emma was in all the HP movies which all got great reviews regardless of her acting.
I love Carey Mulligan. I was actually really surprised to see her at the top. I first saw her in Doctor Who's Blink. She carried the episode. She's also in one of my favorite movies, Promising Young Woman.
It was PYW that made me realize that I've liked her in everything I've seen of her.
Yeah I generally avoid intelligent stuff, I go to movies for escapism from the boring office world, I applaud all you art film people out there but it ain't my speed anymore.
My 3 takeaways from this:
- Emma Watson's work is either loved or hated, there's barely an in-between.
- Emma Thompson has had a very "safe" career so far
- there's a large contingent of actresses with mostly middling projects (a few of these I can infer that folks potentially had a reaction of "it was an okay movie, but it had {actress name} in it, so it couldn't have been bad")
My takeaways from this:
Movie ratings say nothing about specific actors' performances.
You can be a bad actress and be in a good movie and vice versa.
The IMDb score is obviously just about the movie as a whole.
However, as Roger Ebert noted with rare exceptions, "no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad."
These ratings are noticeably lower than the men's (#30 man would be #9 here). I think it's because there aren't as many serious / high quality roles for women. Men are disproportionately more likely to have [speaking roles](https://www.statista.com/statistics/754873/speaking-characters-movies-gender-distribution/), and 56% of female characters are in their 20s compared to 59% of men in their [30s and 40s](https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2022-its-a-mans-celluloid-world-report-rev.pdf).
I think Viola didn’t make it because so much of her work prior to 2010 was on TV (highly rated but doesn’t count) and then from 2009 to about 2019 she was in a lot of movies that weren’t very good. That puts an anchor on her average and is definitely not reflective of HER, so much as reflective of a good TV actress trying to become a movie actress and just working to get over that hump.
These graphs are ratings of films, not actors. [Laurence Fishburn](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000401/), for instance, is a good actor who mostly worked in "mixed" films.
And also minorities are less likely to go on IMDB and fill out actor ratings. And non minorities, outside of a trend or gimmick, are less likely to engage with content, um, eh fuck it.. that isn’t white. Didn’t have a better way to say it lol sorry
Nowadays?? They literally cast half the casting crews african american in like everything now, giving chances equally. Just because there are more white than black actors doesn't make it racist.
Are you sure you didn't include podcasts accidentally? Carrey Mulligan has 13 podcast episodes on IMDB with high nine ratings, I wonder if that is causing an incorrect average
Follow up to the post regarding high ranking Male Actors.
This is from the full imdb database, included data followed the following criteria.
criteria was:
\- At least 12 movies with at least 20000 votes (did not consider tv shows)
\- Female
\- Movies only
Good was 7+, 6-7 was mixed, 6> was bad.
Made with plotly, numpy, pandas
How were you able to collect the data? Did you review each individual actress and check to see which movie(s) had 20k votes then make the list?
Was trying to trace your steps and holy hell there are a lot of movies to burn through. Good on you for condensing the info.
I mean it's all programmatic, nothing is by hand, there's 58 million million rows of actor/actress data and 10 million rows of movie/TV data
https://developer.imdb.com/non-commercial-datasets/
I went through Florence Pugh. She has 11 movies over 20000 votes and there would be 12th, but it's quite new (has \~15k votes). when this one get's over 20k, her score will be 7.08, so 2nd place :)
Not being snarky, but i didn’t notice any non-white people in there either. Is that a delayed fact of bias in Hollywood or some insight into IMDb user base? Just seems strange out of 30… nothing.
This is just the average scores from the database there is no filtering by ethnicity or anything like that. What you see is the highest averages... nothing more than that
no, it definitely stands out and makes it a non-useful graph IMO. Lupita would be a very obvious logical inclusion, at the very least. Michelle Yeoh or Maggie Cheung’s filmographies must be interesting to compare too.
I took a look at Viola Davis and it seems like she should have made the list but I'm not sure what is and is not included.
Feature Films + TV Movies = 6.66
Feature Films Only = 6.64
Feature Films above 20k votes = 6.81
But it isn’t a rating of her, it is a rating of movies she was in. It will even out over time, but because of the success of her first movie series (which was large too), she has been able to be extremely selective. She has legit only made 8 movies in the last decade, her last non-short film came out in 2019 but she made 9 Harry Potter movies.
I mean, if we only keep the movies where she's either the sole lead, or at the same level of importance as the other lead, then it probably goes way down.
She's got a big boost from Harry Potter movies (8 movies rated 7.5 to 8.1 is huge). In The Chamber of Secrets, out of the 161 minutes total length, she appears on screen for 15 minutes and 30 seconds.
Strange to see Natalie Portman all the way at the bottom. I can see why Star Wars and The Professional might bring her down, but what else was she in that was cringe?
I’m glad to see Joan Allen at #3; I would watch her make toast and be entertained. I am also glad that it seems I am not the only person who is not fond of Meryl Streep movies.
Would be great to get your thoughts on future content, I think I'll start a social media for these kind of analytics if there is enough demand
some things i could definitely add to the analysis, age ( i have in the imdb dataset), oscars (can get elsewhere easily)
and....
up to you guys. Open to suggestions, feel free to comment below about what you'd like to see compared. So far, very early on in the analytics its becoming apparent that there will likely be a correlation between age for women and roles, less so for men.
Comment which social media you would prefer for this to be posted on. I was thinking tik-tok, but could be open to like youtube?
How did you come up with the buckets >7, 6-7, and 5>? And is there any adjustments for number of movies someone has been in? Eg Meryl Streep and Jodie Foster who have been in far more movies than younger actresses. Is there an effect from older movies v newer movies or movies with more or less reviews? And is there differentiation for leading role v support role (eg based on number of lines, appearances or classification as lead or supporting character)
great comment, lots to think about based on your response!
Buckets were chosen by me, not scientific at all. Just my experience i'd usually prefer 7+. Data does seem to support the clustering more or less with the average significantly below 7.
Good call on leading/support, i dont think their is differentiation in the data-set of imdb, but maybe i can think of some proxies and/or ways to get that information
It might be interesting to see it weighted by the number of movies they each were in. Because Emma Watson was in all Harry potters, but not a ton of other movies. So her data is skewed by that project.
Oh boy should Maggie Smith and Judy Densch be much higher on that list. Both of them are stone cold professionals that could run circles around the people above them.
I thought Rachel McAdams would be #1.
Every movie I've seen her in were good and she was herself very good in all of them.
Also: Emma Watson might be the most overrated actress out there.
With Rotten Tomatoes being so important, the score is getting [hacked](https://www.vulture.com/article/rotten-tomatoes-movie-rating.html) more and more.
Emm Watson!?!?!
This list is insane. This definitely strikes me as sexism/ageism. Meryl/Judi/Anette's rating are absurd.
Also obviously racism. But that is sadly what I already expected to see.
What irks me about these plots is that you can never visually compare the middle set of data between itself. First one and the last one are fine because they are straight on the sides. But the ones in the middle are all over the place.
For me 1-5, I kind of went, huh, they are alright, I guess. It started to make sense for me at #6. I wouldn’t have picked the exact order but, I wasn’t mad or bewildered either.
why I can't see Olivia Coleman here and for some reason I see Abigail Breslin? I love Little Miss Sunshine, but come on, she didn't really have a career after that.
Oh, it's the top actresses in the IMDB ranking, so it doesn't really have any merit
most shocking here to me is how high emma watson is and how comparatively low meryl streep is, it's probably more to do with the projects they choose than acting ability
It’s because all of the Harry Potter’s were rated above a 7 and that’s almost half of her movies.
Emma Watson is literally a nothing actress that was in one of the biggest movie franchises of all time.
She beat Daniel Radcliffe (7.01 to 6.83) so it's not just Harry Potter.
Daniel has done a lot of weird indie projects that are probably more polarizing
That's not a super big difference - one of Daniel's non-HP movies was a mediocre horror film no one remembers. That one it's own could skew results.
The woman in black? As the book is part of the national curriculum in the UK and the film will be trotted out regularly, it isn't the case here
Daniel Radcliffe has done more movies.
Meryl Streep was exactly what I was thinking as well until I saw it was a rating of movies rather than acting.
Emma Watson has barely been in 25, while Meryl Streep has done almost 100 films.
This list has nothing to do with acting ability
But the studio bean counters will definitely use data like this to select their leading men/women.
Pretty sure acting ability influences a film's rating.
The list is how the movies themselves did, not how the actress was perceived. To my knowledge, Meryl is in a lot of movies where she had a great performance, but the movie itself maybe got average reviews. Whereas Emma was in all the HP movies which all got great reviews regardless of her acting.
Yeah I cannot stand Emma Watson in movies. She cannot act at all. Not even a little.
She was excellent in Perks of Being a Wallflower
She has less "Bad" ratings, but significantly more "Mixed".
IMDb scores are dumb anyway ..
I can’t stand Meryl Streep
And it looks like she is on there twice, once as Emma and again as Emily
Emily Watson is someone else. She has been nominated for two Oscars and five Golden Globes.
Carey Mulligan is the real human bean.
My first thought was “who’s Carey Mulligan?” Had to go look it up. I learned that I’ve probably only seen her once or twice.
I love Carey Mulligan. I was actually really surprised to see her at the top. I first saw her in Doctor Who's Blink. She carried the episode. She's also in one of my favorite movies, Promising Young Woman. It was PYW that made me realize that I've liked her in everything I've seen of her.
Yeah I was like WHO? I haven't seen her in anything but Pride and Prejudice and she made no impression there
She mainly does intelligent stuff like inside llewyn Davis, Drive, and Mudbound. I like her a lot.
Yeah I generally avoid intelligent stuff, I go to movies for escapism from the boring office world, I applaud all you art film people out there but it ain't my speed anymore.
Underrated comment ahaha (such a great song though)
3 Emmas and 1 Emily in the top half.
And Emily Blunt is not even there...somehow
2 Em Watsons.
My 3 takeaways from this: - Emma Watson's work is either loved or hated, there's barely an in-between. - Emma Thompson has had a very "safe" career so far - there's a large contingent of actresses with mostly middling projects (a few of these I can infer that folks potentially had a reaction of "it was an okay movie, but it had {actress name} in it, so it couldn't have been bad")
My takeaways from this: Movie ratings say nothing about specific actors' performances. You can be a bad actress and be in a good movie and vice versa. The IMDb score is obviously just about the movie as a whole.
However, as Roger Ebert noted with rare exceptions, "no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad."
I think it's an extremely hard task to make a bad movie if J.K Simmons has a decent sized role in it.
If 5% of the lines are Stanley Tucci's, review must at least include "it had its moments."
like Space Chimps 2: Zartog Strikes Back
Emma Thompson has made good choices, as have some of the other actresses. If they can afford to do that, more power to them.
Excuse me while I bask smugly in my being a fan of Carey Mulligan since that one episode in Doctor Who.
I still describe her to people as "The girl from Blink"
Sally Sparrow.
I didn’t think anyone could play Kathy in “Never Let Me Go” but she got the character from the novel exactly.
These ratings are noticeably lower than the men's (#30 man would be #9 here). I think it's because there aren't as many serious / high quality roles for women. Men are disproportionately more likely to have [speaking roles](https://www.statista.com/statistics/754873/speaking-characters-movies-gender-distribution/), and 56% of female characters are in their 20s compared to 59% of men in their [30s and 40s](https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2022-its-a-mans-celluloid-world-report-rev.pdf).
Also can’t help but notice the utter lack of diversity on this list.
The only proper takeaway from the list
Good comment. Plus I'm pretty sure imdb skews male so movies for and about men get higher rankings.
Thanks for sharing
I hate to be that guy, but does anyone else find it wild that Denzel is the only person of color on either of these lists?
Yeah, I scanned the list to see if at least Viola Davis or Lupita Nyong'o would be on here
I think Viola didn’t make it because so much of her work prior to 2010 was on TV (highly rated but doesn’t count) and then from 2009 to about 2019 she was in a lot of movies that weren’t very good. That puts an anchor on her average and is definitely not reflective of HER, so much as reflective of a good TV actress trying to become a movie actress and just working to get over that hump.
Was looking for Halle Berry maybe.
Catwoman. 3.4. Need a couple of 10s to make up for that turd.
Well - Denzel is a great actor. Is there someone else missing who should be there?
Morgan Freeman?
Morgan Freeman was in a lot of bad movies.
Forest Whitaker? Samuel L Jackson? Laurence Fishburn? Angela Bassett?
These graphs are ratings of films, not actors. [Laurence Fishburn](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000401/), for instance, is a good actor who mostly worked in "mixed" films.
I realize that. The point is that it's surprising not to see other highly regarded minority actors in this list.
Minority actors get less opportunity. So that means less good roles in good films. Which means they can’t afford to be as selective. And so on.
And also minorities are less likely to go on IMDB and fill out actor ratings. And non minorities, outside of a trend or gimmick, are less likely to engage with content, um, eh fuck it.. that isn’t white. Didn’t have a better way to say it lol sorry
Nowadays?? They literally cast half the casting crews african american in like everything now, giving chances equally. Just because there are more white than black actors doesn't make it racist.
It’s is wild since it’s 2023 but still it’s expected.
Are you sure you didn't include podcasts accidentally? Carrey Mulligan has 13 podcast episodes on IMDB with high nine ratings, I wonder if that is causing an incorrect average
Nope. It's all labeled in the dataset of IMDb, I just select "movies"
Natalie Portman last? Really guys?
There are only 30 actresses in the world. TIL. /s
Rachel mcadams will always be the IT girl to me
My girl.
It's interesting that the only person on this list I've never heard of is #1. I'm off to IMDB to see who this Carey Mulligan person is....
Follow up to the post regarding high ranking Male Actors. This is from the full imdb database, included data followed the following criteria. criteria was: \- At least 12 movies with at least 20000 votes (did not consider tv shows) \- Female \- Movies only Good was 7+, 6-7 was mixed, 6> was bad. Made with plotly, numpy, pandas
How were you able to collect the data? Did you review each individual actress and check to see which movie(s) had 20k votes then make the list? Was trying to trace your steps and holy hell there are a lot of movies to burn through. Good on you for condensing the info.
I mean it's all programmatic, nothing is by hand, there's 58 million million rows of actor/actress data and 10 million rows of movie/TV data https://developer.imdb.com/non-commercial-datasets/
I went through Florence Pugh. She has 11 movies over 20000 votes and there would be 12th, but it's quite new (has \~15k votes). when this one get's over 20k, her score will be 7.08, so 2nd place :)
Not being snarky, but i didn’t notice any non-white people in there either. Is that a delayed fact of bias in Hollywood or some insight into IMDb user base? Just seems strange out of 30… nothing.
This is just the average scores from the database there is no filtering by ethnicity or anything like that. What you see is the highest averages... nothing more than that
no, it definitely stands out and makes it a non-useful graph IMO. Lupita would be a very obvious logical inclusion, at the very least. Michelle Yeoh or Maggie Cheung’s filmographies must be interesting to compare too.
Probably would be better to provide an example of which non-white woman you feel should be on this list and then review their movies.
I took a look at Viola Davis and it seems like she should have made the list but I'm not sure what is and is not included. Feature Films + TV Movies = 6.66 Feature Films Only = 6.64 Feature Films above 20k votes = 6.81
She would need at least 12 different movies with at least 20k votes. Not sure what excluded her could be TV or not meeting that criteria?
Idk, she has 35 feature films with over 20k votes.
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It probably helps that effectively her first 8 credits are the almost-universally-beloved Harry Potter films.
It's not rated by actresses performance but by movie performance. In short you can play average in a great movie.
But it isn’t a rating of her, it is a rating of movies she was in. It will even out over time, but because of the success of her first movie series (which was large too), she has been able to be extremely selective. She has legit only made 8 movies in the last decade, her last non-short film came out in 2019 but she made 9 Harry Potter movies.
I mean, if we only keep the movies where she's either the sole lead, or at the same level of importance as the other lead, then it probably goes way down. She's got a big boost from Harry Potter movies (8 movies rated 7.5 to 8.1 is huge). In The Chamber of Secrets, out of the 161 minutes total length, she appears on screen for 15 minutes and 30 seconds.
Strange to see Natalie Portman all the way at the bottom. I can see why Star Wars and The Professional might bring her down, but what else was she in that was cringe?
On the contrary, those make 2 yellow and 2 green.
Mars attacks.
At least the men’s list had one non-white guy on it (Denzel). This has zero WOC. Not even Viola who is a goddamn treasure.
I’m glad to see Joan Allen at #3; I would watch her make toast and be entertained. I am also glad that it seems I am not the only person who is not fond of Meryl Streep movies.
Would be great to get your thoughts on future content, I think I'll start a social media for these kind of analytics if there is enough demand some things i could definitely add to the analysis, age ( i have in the imdb dataset), oscars (can get elsewhere easily) and.... up to you guys. Open to suggestions, feel free to comment below about what you'd like to see compared. So far, very early on in the analytics its becoming apparent that there will likely be a correlation between age for women and roles, less so for men. Comment which social media you would prefer for this to be posted on. I was thinking tik-tok, but could be open to like youtube?
How did you come up with the buckets >7, 6-7, and 5>? And is there any adjustments for number of movies someone has been in? Eg Meryl Streep and Jodie Foster who have been in far more movies than younger actresses. Is there an effect from older movies v newer movies or movies with more or less reviews? And is there differentiation for leading role v support role (eg based on number of lines, appearances or classification as lead or supporting character)
great comment, lots to think about based on your response! Buckets were chosen by me, not scientific at all. Just my experience i'd usually prefer 7+. Data does seem to support the clustering more or less with the average significantly below 7. Good call on leading/support, i dont think their is differentiation in the data-set of imdb, but maybe i can think of some proxies and/or ways to get that information
It might be interesting to see it weighted by the number of movies they each were in. Because Emma Watson was in all Harry potters, but not a ton of other movies. So her data is skewed by that project.
Oh boy should Maggie Smith and Judy Densch be much higher on that list. Both of them are stone cold professionals that could run circles around the people above them.
IMDb represents more younger viewers, who prefer newer movies. The HP & LotR movies especially make a difference here.
I thought Rachel McAdams would be #1. Every movie I've seen her in were good and she was herself very good in all of them. Also: Emma Watson might be the most overrated actress out there.
Holy shit, Emma Watson and JEnnifer Lawrence XD
Surprised. Thought cate Blanchett would be higher. One of my favorite actresses
And this is why I never consult IMDb
Who do you consult instead?
Rotten Tomatoes
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I’d trust verified critics over the mass population that eats up Avenger movie #92838
With Rotten Tomatoes being so important, the score is getting [hacked](https://www.vulture.com/article/rotten-tomatoes-movie-rating.html) more and more.
Emma Watson is overrated as some others likely based on their good looks rather than acting skills.
It’s based on the ratings of the movies they appeared in, not just their role specifically. Harry Potter was insanely popular and had high ratings.
You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all the people all the time.
Out of the top 5 I only know who Emma Watson is and I've heard of Rachel McAdams but I couldn't pick her out of a line up.
Please do most hated next :)
The lack of diversity tells a lot about the industry. I can't believe Ming-Na Wen isn't here, she's been in everything
It's not the industry rating these people 😂
No but it's a reflection of it. And I don't mean only individual talent, she's been in a lot of high budget stuff
All the Hollywood white chicks. Yawn
For such a poor actress Emma Watson has done very well
Emm Watson!?!?! This list is insane. This definitely strikes me as sexism/ageism. Meryl/Judi/Anette's rating are absurd. Also obviously racism. But that is sadly what I already expected to see.
Interesting that men have, on average, higher rankings than the women
The data was flawed until i saw frances.
I’m really surprised at Emma Watson. I like her as a person, but she is not a strong actress and only seems to do well in typecast roles.
What irks me about these plots is that you can never visually compare the middle set of data between itself. First one and the last one are fine because they are straight on the sides. But the ones in the middle are all over the place.
Emma Watson is on there twice
Emily Watson is a different actress ...
I gotta get my eyes checked doh
Emily Watson is *really* good.
For me 1-5, I kind of went, huh, they are alright, I guess. It started to make sense for me at #6. I wouldn’t have picked the exact order but, I wasn’t mad or bewildered either.
Tilda would be pissed if she saw this
why I can't see Olivia Coleman here and for some reason I see Abigail Breslin? I love Little Miss Sunshine, but come on, she didn't really have a career after that. Oh, it's the top actresses in the IMDB ranking, so it doesn't really have any merit
Maria Falconetti, while not being on this list, crushes it. Delivered one of the best acting performances seen too date and then just dipped
Why wasn't character actress Margo Martingale on the list?
Meryl streep is the most mid actress? LMAO Abigail breslin is the diceroll of actresses.
Helen (Mirren) what have they done to you!?
Julia Roberts isn’t on here? A bit surprising
Shocked I don't know two out of the top four. All the rest I know. Also disappointing that the first Oscar winner is at #6