In a previous article, I have looked at the ‘brands’ of top actors by studying the genres they most frequently appear in.
Today, I am going to look at another facet of an actor’s brand: what their presence in a movie signals to the audience about the movie’s quality.
Quality is obviously a subjective term and so rather than trying to figure this out myself, I’m going to use two proxies:
- Metascore, which is a weighted average of the ratings given by top film critics, as calculated by Metacritic.
- IMDb audience rating, which is the score given by IMDb users.
I’ll be looking at both measures as these two constituencies – critics and audiences – don’t always agree. Critics tend to favour high-brow, dramatic content …
