 |
This is an essayonarticle content. It contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more WikiProjects on how the content policies may be interpreted within their area of interest.
This information is not a formal Wikipedia policy or guideline, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. |
Below are what I consider best practices for writing articles about films and articles about cast and crew members. The best practices outlined below are intended to complement Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Film.
Avoid having both critical reception and audience reception in the same sentence or paragraph since per WP:SYNTH, this implies the conclusion that these two outcomes should be compared. Audience reception is what is measured from opening-weekend audiences who are self-selecting. In contrast, critics review films as part of their profession, whether or not they actually want to see the film. As an example, opening-weekend audiences went to see Brad PittinKilling Them Softly and gave it an "F" grade since it was not the kind of film they expected.
The "Critical reception" section should not include audience reception since it is intended for how critics received the film. Including audience reception implies a conclusion as explained above. Audience reception instead belongs with other release and box office details since reliable sources write about a positive opening-weekend reception being correlated to subsequent box office performance.
Avoid having both the production budget and the box office gross in the same sentence or paragraph since per WP:SYNTH, this implies the conclusion that these two numbers should be compared. This synthesized sentence usually appears in the lead section. The implication of this sentence's framing is whether or not the film broke even. It omits other factors such as prints and advertising (P&A), tax breaks, and distribution sales. Editors should cover the production budget in the part of the lead section that covers other production details and cover the box office gross in the part that covers release details. Where sources exist, the aforementioned additional factors and commentary about a film's fiscal success or failure should be covered in the article body and summarized in the lead section.
The first sentence for an article about the film should put the topic in context for non-specialist readers per WP:LEAD. Context varies by film, and WP:FILMLEAD recommends only the following: "At minimum, the opening sentence should identify the following elements: the title of the film, the year of its earliest public release (including film festival screenings), and the primary genre or sub-genre under which it is verifiably classified." Historically, the director is routinely named in the first sentence, as well as similar credits like writers and producers, but no policy or guideline requires this approach. While some directors are well-known enough that naming them upfront is a foregone conclusion, there are many directors who are not as well-known to non-specialist readers. In some of these cases, it is possible for the more noteworthy context to be other elements such as the source material or the starring actor(s). The noteworthiness of certain elements can often be found in reliable sources writing about the film and how they introduce the topic.
Parts of policies and guidelines that support the above:
Examples of the above being applied:
While most best practices are for articles about films, this best practice is more for articles about actors and filmmakers. "Filmography" should not be used as a section heading when the person has credits other than those for films. A filmography is a list of films, and the well-detailed Wikipedia article for "filmography" supports this definition. I have found other reliable sources to support this definition. This heading is commonplace on Wikipedia, and it may have to do with IMDb using the same heading even as it included TV and video-game credits. At the start of December 2022, however, IMDb revamped their website and changed the heading from "Filmography" to "Credits". Wikipedia should follow suit for credits that are not just film.
That said, there are other and better terms to use as a section heading. My current preference is "Credits", but there could be other broad terms that are similarly appropriate.
Wikipedia's guideline on red links says in a nutshell, "Red links for subjects that should have articles but do not, are not only acceptable, but needed in the articles. They serve as a clear indication of which articles are in need of creation, and encourage it. Only remove red links if you are certain that Wikipedia should not have an article on that subject." In mainstream film articles, many articles on films and related cast and crew have been created. However, two areas where red links tend to happen are the films' source material and non-director crew members. Due to the relative rarity of red links in a sea of otherwise blue links, some editors think red links should be de-linked either on the grounds that an article does not exist or because they look out of place. However, the guideline is clear about not removing red links for these reasons, and they should only be removed if there appears to be no reliably sourced coverage about the topic. A simple search engine test can be performed to see about whether or not to add (or restore) a red link, and editors who have removed red links should be informed of the guidelines.
Many film articles reference the review aggregators Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic in "Critical reception" sections. We should think more critically about how to write "Critical reception" sections. First, the goal of the section is to tell the reader how critics received the film. There are two ways to tell this: 1.) as a whole, and 2.) what certain critics thought specifically. It could be possible to only tell the critical reception as a whole, but this requires substantial analysis from secondary sources that identify the various trends. This is very uncommon, at least until natural language processing can process reviews and summarize them for us. In the meantime, we really only reference individual reviews because we often cannot describe the critical reception as a whole in much detail. In essence, we try to give readers a sample set of what individual critics thought of a film.
For referencing individual reviews, review aggregators can help indicate the WP:BALANCE of reviews in terms of if they loved the film, liked it, felt lukewarm, disliked it, or hated it (and in between). However, we must remember what review aggregators actually are. They are commercial products intended to tell consumers if a film is worth seeing or not. They are not specifically intended to provide a non-commercial summary based on an in-depth review of multiple reviews. The two most prominent review aggregators are critiqued below.
Metacritic aggregates reviews and categorizes a review as positive, mixed, or negative. The number of reviews that it aggregates is smaller than Rotten Tomatoes, being around 50-60 at most. (For comparison, Rotten Tomatoes aggregates up to 380-390 reviews.) Metacritic... (to be continued)
Rotten Tomatoes aggregates reviews for a film, and for each review, it only identifies if the review was positive or negative. There is no in-between, and there is no indication if the critic liked it or loved it, or if they disliked it or hated it. To illustrate how this is an over-simplification, we can compare two films and use Metacritic (which categorizes reviews as positive, negative, or mixed and gives a weighted average score):
Looking only at Rotten Tomatoes, with both films being in the 90th percentile, it looks like critics loved both The Avengers and Gravity. Looking at Metacritic too, we can tell that critics liked The Avengers but loved Gravity.
While Rotten Tomatoes shows the "average rating" for a film on a scale of 1 to 10, it does not publicly show every review's actual rating. Some listed reviews will show a rating, while others will show a letter grade, while others will show nothing. If we look at the average ratings for the above case, we see 8.1 for The Avengers and 8.9 for Gravity. While we do not know the distribution of the ratings, these average ratings are closer than the overall scores to the "truth" of how critics received a film. Unfortunately, it is commonplace for film articles to display the overall scores more prominently than the average ratings in a way that extends the commercial nature of Rotten Tomatoes. We should avoid perpetuating that commercial factor and use the relevant information in this non-commercial encyclopedia to write in a historical perspective about how critics received the film and not cater to contemporary moviegoers.
Another downside to Rotten Tomatoes is that while the "critics' consensus" that it publishes can be used to help determine the WP:BALANCE of reviews and what elements in these reviews to expand on, the consensus is published early on in the film's release and is only based on the first reviews. To show an example, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has 84% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 389 reviews. Rotten Tomatoes reports the critics' consensus, "A poignant tribute that satisfyingly moves the franchise forward, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever marks an ambitious and emotionally rewarding triumph for the MCU." The Internet Archive shows that this was reported when there were 127 reviews, as seen here. Rotten Tomatoes is interested in telling its consumers right away what critics thought of a film. It has no incentive to wait until most reviews are aggregated before determining a consensus.
(to be written)
