(Originally published as a blog post on March 9, 2009).

I’m changing the way I rate movie reviews on the site. I started with an old standby - the letter grade. I recently moved to a liked it slash didn’t like it scale, but I found that didn’t have much flexibility. It was too black and white. Now, I’m moving to actually a scale Farrah and I use in the real world. The scale, which I am sure is used somewhere else, is based on how much you are willing to pay to see a movie.

The scale is as follows:

• Full Admission - Willing to pay for a full-price theater ticket, especially on a crowded Friday night.
• Matinee - See it in a theater, but do it as cheap as possible.
• Rental (DVD, Blu-ray, whatever media you choose) - See it right when it hits the retail market.
• Cable TV - You can wait until it shows up on cable to watch.

I’m sure there are other ratings that can be placed in there (e.g. cheap theaters, broadcast television) but I don’t find those ideal situations to watch most movies. Plus I don’t have a cheap theater near me and broadcast television has too many commercials to suffer through.

Here are a few samples of movies I’ve reviewed and how I would rate them on this new scale:

• Full Admission - 300, The Dark Knight, Wall-E, Juno
• Matinee - Quantum of Solace, Grand Torino, Knocked Up
• Rental - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Transformers
• Cable TV - Nights in Rodanthe, Spider-Man 3

This makes sense, right?