So it appears that my former neighbour Upendra’s new magnum opus Uppi2 is currently the top rated movie on IMDB, with a rating of 9.7/10.0. The Times of India is so surprised that it has done an entire story about it, which I’ve screenshot here: 
The story also mentions that another Kannada movie RangiTaranga (which I’ve reviewed here) is in third spot, with a rating of 9.4 out of 10. This might lead you to wonder why Kannada movies have suddenly turned out to be so good. The answer, however, lies in simple logic.
The first is that both are relatively new movies and hence their ratings suffer from “small sample bias”. Of course, the sample isn’t that small – Uppi2 has received 1900 votes, which is 3 times as much as its 1999 prequel Upendra. Yet, it being a new movie, only a subset of the small set of people who have watched it so far would have reviewed it.
The second is selection bias. The people who see a movie in its first week are usually the hardcore fans, and in this case it is hardcore fans of Upendra’s movies. And hardcore fans usually find it hard to have their belief shaken (a version of what I’ve written about online opinions for Mint here), and hence they all give the movie a high rating.
As time goes by, and people who are not as hardcore fans of Upendra start watching and reviewing the movie, the ratings are likely to rationalise. Finally, ratings are easy to rig, especially when samples are small. For example, an Upendra fan club might have decided to play up the movie online by voting en masse on IMDB, and pushing up its ratings. This might explain both why the movie already has 1900 ratings in four days, and most of them are extremely positive.
The solution for this is for the rating system (IMDB in this case) to pay more weightage for “verified ratings” (by people who have rated more movies in the past, for instance), or remove highly correlated ratings. Right now, the rating algorithm seems pretty naive.
Coming back to Uppi2, from what I’ve heard from people, the movie is supposed to be really good, though perhaps not 9.7 good. I plan to watch the movie in the next few days and will write a review once I do so.
Meanwhile, read this absolutely brilliant review (in Kannada) written by this guy called “Jogi”
I think it happens with TV series which generally is watched by its loyal followers and they end up rating it high on IMDB.
And the link to Jogi’s review seems to be broken.
FYI – The Udayavani link is broken
1900 was before now it is 4000+ but still the rating is same and no fan especially upendra fans don’t vote blind folded if that was the case then uppi’s previous movies(supero ranga, bramha) should have been on top rating list even his last directorial super is rated 7.8 with 600+ votes… all movies in the world get its majority rating in the first week of its release ex: bahubali current rating 9.1 with 45000+ votes bahubali first week rating was around 20000+ so according to ur logic 20000 prabhas fans voted in first week… first watch the movie yes its confusing so is inception & interstellar.. upendra is like christopher nolan of india so watch the latest masterpiece of kannada