With movie tickets soon projected to reach $20 (if they haven’t already) deciding which films to spend your precious currency on has become an important investment decision. Into the breach have stepped websites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic to help you find out what critics are saying about the movies. But which website should you trust?

Take the latest Avengers movie. Rotten Tomatoes has given it a stunning 93%, while Metacritic gives it the far less impressive 69. To even further complicate matters, in addition to surveying the responses of critics, each site also invites users to submit their own ratings. Rotten Tomatoes gives Twilight: New Moon an abysmal 28%. Its users on the other hand give it a respectable 78%.

Centives decided to solve the problem by creating a calculator that measures your ratings for individual movies, and then determines which site’s relative rankings for movies best matches yours. We surveyed the data from Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, IMDB, and the ratings for the standard DVD versions of movies on Amazon. This version of the calculator is designed for Hollywood movies, later on in the week we’ll publish one for Bollywood.

If you want to go ahead and start using the calculator, then rate some of the movies (we recommend at least 15) on a scale from 0-100 below. If you prefer a five star scale system, then just convert those into numbers (1 star = 20, 2 stars = 40 etc.) Once you’re done rating, scroll down and find out which website’s ratings are best for you. Click on the ‘Advanced Results’ tab along the bottom to see expanded data. You can find notes about the data as well as some interesting conclusions below the calculator.

Our data shows us that based on our sample of 50 movies, Amazon users are most likely to give movies the highest rating. This makes sense since you’re more likely to buy the film on Amazon if you watched it in theaters and enjoyed it. The users of Rotten Tomatoes aren’t far behind in giving movies high grades. On the other end of the spectrum, Metacritic has the highest standards and awards movies the lowest grades.

Across all sites Toy Story 3, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and The Dark Knight were considered the best of the 50 highest grossing movies. Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1, Twilight: New Moon, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, 2012, and The Da Vinci Code were the worst. There was least disagreement about The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – everybody agreed it was great. There was most disagreement about Twilight: New Moon – the users of Rotten Tomatoes and Amazon rated it highly, but everybody else disliked it.

And now a note about our data selection. The fifty movies we selected above are the nominal highest grossing movies of all time. Using these movies has several advantages. First, because the numbers are not inflation adjusted, the movies are biased towards more recent ones which is good because you’re more likely to want to see what different websites say about newer movies.

Second, by using box office success, rather than critical response, we get a range in the quality of movies. The list includes the critically acclaimed Star Wars (Episode IV), and the less well received Matrix: Reloaded. Moreover the list is still biased towards higher quality productions which is likely what you’ll use this calculator for.

If you enjoyed this article then you should check back later for our Bollywood movie rating calculator. You might also like our Pizza Topping Markup calculator and Monopoly Property Value calculator. You can find this and other articles in our Editorials although for a selection of the best check out our Greatest Hits. And be sure to stay in touch: