If you’re wandering around the Plugged In website this afternoon and happen to open up one of our new movie reviews, you’ll notice they look a little different.
We’ve made the pictures bigger! Pretty nifty, right?
OK, OK, that’s not the only thing that’s new. We’ve also added five big electrical plugs and three human heads (of various sizes and colors). All of those little design doodads add up to one thing: Plugged In is introducing a ratings system to the movie reviews on our website.
You’ve heard our reviews on radio stations that include a rating at the end. And you’ve seen them on our mobile app. Now we’ve improved them for our website.
We knew they needed to 1) Be a real help to you, our reader, 2) Stay true to our philosophy of giving you the information you need without creating ironclad lists of “go” and “don’t go,” and 3) Be easy to figure out.
So here’s what we came up with:
The plugs represent an overall rating for the movie, with 0 reserved for movies featuring absolutely nothing positive and 5 for films with just about nothing negative. Here’s the way our on-page help box reads: “This unique Plugged In Rating for families is based on a movie’s content elements and worldview, not necessarily its artistic qualities. The more the green fills the plugs, the more family friendly a movie is.”
Then, to give a bit of context to those overall ratings, we’re introducing new “Content Caution” tags. If you see a red head icon for a particular age group (kids, teens, adults), you can assume a great deal of caution should be exercised before heading to the theater or streaming the video. If it’s yellow, then a medium amount of caution is required. If you see green, that means a mild amount of caution is needed.
These are not stoplights, I should say here, even though they borrow their colors! Red does not necessarily mean avoid at all costs. Green does not mean run as fast as you can to buy a ticket.
Both of these ratings tools are designed to work in tandem with our written reviews, too. That’s where we do the real work of discernment.
So with all of that said, we hand this new ratings system over to you. Hopefully it’ll make your process of deciding what to see not just easier, but better. Hopefully it will help you as you hone your ability—and your family’s ability—to navigate the world of popular entertainment. After all, that’s our most important goal here: To give you the words and the images you need to make wise entertainment choices and intelligently engage with what you see and hear.
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