Slate‘s Hollywood Career-O-Matic

A visitor to the Rotten Tomatoes site can check out the data for individual Hollywood careers—that’s how Tabarrok came up with the Shyamalan graph—but there’s no easy way for users to measure industrywide trends or to compare different actors and directors side-by-side. To that end, Rotten Tomatoes kindly let Slate analyze the scores in its enormous database and create an interactive tool so our readers might do the same.

It only works from 1985 on, on the hypothesis that people tend not to review old clunkers as often as the classics, which results in sampling bias and this is what skews the older results.

As a general trend, actors seem to be all over the place, score-wise, but directors tend to get better over time.