As we all know, the problem with criticism is that it’s all too arbitrary. People are wrong about things all the time! Without a consistent, strictly codified system of defining and assigning value to art, how can I be sure that the reviewer describing The Chronicles of Riddick as a white-knuckle thrill ride can be trusted? So we spend our adult lives molding our taste, comparing it to this critic’s body of writing and that, weighing agreements against disagreements until we’ve found a handful of simpatico minds that can be safely relied on. But god, who has the time? Life is full of enough uncertainty already, who has it in them to accidentally watch a bad movie?

In the spirit of appeasing the ever-more-vocal “facts, not feelings” crowd, ScreenCrush has introduced some hard rationality to this namby-pamby film-crit game. We’re toying with a new system of appraising film franchises, in which each individual installment takes on a numerical rating set at an integer between 1 and 5, which are then totaled and divided to reach a single aggregate score that can be easily compared between series. At long last, instead of pondering the thousand nuances of preference, a curious viewer can simply make their decision based on the numbers. (All rulings are final.) Read on:

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