Winning $75 on 65 or Lower

I have a bet set up about the critical reception of the new Indiana Jones film. My gut feeling is that the film will not be better than "pretty good." Using Metacritic as a reference point I can see that they rated The Last Crusade a 65. While still favorable, a 65 is, like The Last Crusade, a pretty forgettable film.

So my bet was that the Crystal Skull will do no better than Last Crusade. This was a $20 bet that was upped to $50 after seeing the CG effects of the first trailer. My betting opponent was very sure of himself, and we made another $20 bet, this time with the film needing to get over 70.

Now I'm sitting here refreshing the Metacritic page watching the reviews come in, and the idea hits me that maybe I can predict the scores of the reviews. So I take a few films that are in the same range; films like The Bank Job, Redbelt, and Horton Hears a Who! and I look at what each critic rated that film. Some sources seem to have a clear tendency to rate high (Entertainment Weekly) while others seem a little harsher on average (Austin Chronicle).

After making some mildly educated guesses I predicted a final score of 67, two points shy of my ultimate $70 win. But Metacritic is a strange beast, and the actual published score seems to be lower than the average of all the review by a point or two. So I held out hope.

Right now the score is down to an agonizing 66. Just one point away. Metacritic tends to collect at least 30 reviews, and the 66 only represents 25, so the number could easily shift up or down. I guess at this point I just have to wait and hope that the Austin Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, or the Washington Post hates it.