Before you watch a movie, you tend to do research on it. That’s because you need to figure out whether the time you spend on watching a movie is worth it or not. If the movie is not good, you will waste a couple of good hours with disappointment.
In such a situation, you will regret about not spending your time to watch another movie and not doing a proper background study on the movie that you watched.
To avoid disappointment, you need to grab some information about the movie before you watch. It is completely different from just going through the trailer of the movie. The trailer of the movie is not in a position to tell you whether the movie is a good one to watch or not. It is a video clip that is created for marketing purposes. Therefore, you need to look for a more reliable method to do a background study on a movie. That’s where word of mouth and reviews come into play.
If you know a friend, colleague or a relative who has seen the movie before, you go ahead and consult him/her. Then you will be provided with almost all the information that you need to know about the movie. For example, you will be able to figure out what sort of a movie it is and the success of conveying message. Since you know the people you consult, you have the ability to figure out whether they are telling the truth to you or not.
When you are talking to someone in person, you will be able to get more information about the movie via the body language as well. If you are consulting someone that you don’t know much, this is the most convenient method available for you to figure out whether you are provided with truthful information or not. But if you are talking to someone that you don’t know over the phone, you can analyze the tone of voice.
From all the above mentioned methods, it is clear that you are assured to get a honest opinion about the movie. Since you have a basic understanding about the preferences of the person, you will be able to analyze whether the information communicated to you will be the same for you or not. For example, you can ask how a romantic movie was from a person who loves watching horror movies. In most of the cases, you will be told that he didn’t enjoy the movie because there were no horror scenes at all. If you have similar preferences, you need to understand that you will not like the movie as well. That’s why it is a good idea to get in touch with someone who has similar preferences to consult and ask for a viewpoint of a specific movie. Then you will be provided with the opportunity to get a straightforward answer.
Online reviews can also be considered as an excellent method available for you to understand how a movie was. However, it is not good as word of mouth. That’s because you haven’t seen the people or you haven’t interacted with the people who posted those online reviews. You never know whether those are verified reviews or not. On the other hand, you are not aware about the preferences of the person who wrote the review. Hence, you will not be able to get a good picture about the review. You can just see some words and you are not in a position to understand the credibility behind it.
As you can see, people still prefer to go through word of mouth than reviews when they are looking forward to enjoy a specific movie. It is true that the popularity of reviews is increasing. However, they have not yet been able to surpass the popularity associated with word of mouth. We aren’t too sure about what will happen in future. If more sophisticated technologies such as AI and personalization are introduced to reviews, people might change the consultation method.
