The Kernel

A transparent, weighted critic score with the box-office story and the track record behind it — not just a fresh/rotten binary.

Coming Soon

Trailers worth getting excited about

Now playing
New, but not in theaters

Released in the last 90 days and worth watching — just not on a big screen near you right now.

Kernel All-Time ranking
The Film Vault

Searches this site's current catalog — a growing vault, not yet an exhaustive archive.

Great, but does anyone know it exists? — score vs. worldwide box office Hidden gem Everything else

Quadrants split at a 70 Kernel Score and $100M worldwide — round, illustrative dividing lines, not a claim of statistical significance at n=11. Hover a dot for exact numbers.

Scores reuse published Metacritic data as a stand-in for a full weighted, per-critic model. Revenue and box-office curves connect real reported checkpoints with straight-line interpolation, not a daily feed. Breakeven uses an industry rule of thumb (2× budget + marketing). The legs average reflects only the films in this dataset with weekend-by-weekend data — still a small sample, not an industry benchmark. Director and lead-actor averages are simple means of each person's published scores and may not reflect a complete filmography. The audience-review form logs submissions to kernel-data-service as an unmodifiable, timestamped fact, same as the rest of this dataset — but it does not apply the verified-eligibility, velocity-cap, or cold-start-floor methodology described elsewhere; anyone can submit, so the resulting "Demo Audience Score" is exactly what it says: self-reported and unverified, not a real Kernel audience score. Films with fewer than 3 self-reported reviews additionally show a borrowed IMDb audience average and up to 3 TMDb user reviews (capped, excerpted, always linked back to the original) to avoid looking empty; both disappear automatically and permanently once 3 real reviews accumulate. Films released via streaming instead of a theatrical run show Nielsen's weekly Streaming Top 10 hours viewed in place of a box-office chart — Nielsen only publishes the top 10 titles per week across all platforms, so a film needs enough viewership to qualify, the same constraint Metacritic applies to critic scores.
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