Pixar still has it

A while back I asked ‘How long can they keep it up?‘ I was pointing out that Pixar had delivered a total of ten movies, which at worst were very good, and eight of them were in the IMDB Top 250 list.

Now Toy Story 3, the eleventh, has been released, and in its first weekend of release in the US, has made $US109 million, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com. According to IMDB, with 6,000+ votes it rates at 9.4/10, a ludicrous result. The more restrictive Top 250 list has it at #34 with a score of 8.6 — only ‘regular voters’ are counted for this, and the score is weighted to take into account the number of votes.

I haven’t seen the movie of course, but 8.6 seems like a more reasonable result. As the days and weeks pass, there will be two forces on this figure. First, the initial rush of voting by uncritical fans will die down, bringing down the front page figure and applying downwards pressure to the figure on the Top 250 page.

Second, as more valid votes are added, the weighting formula will give the result  a boost (the more votes, the closer to the actual headline rate that it’s allowed).

Meanwhile, I can think of only three other series of movies in which the third part largely measured up to, or was even better than, the first two. Using the IMDB front page votes we have:

Perhaps I’m being too kind to Star Wars. Any others?