I just want to say that I have really enjoyed this series of posts. My concern with this kind of analysis is more ontological (?), I guess. While IMDB data is easy to understand, and it's interesting to see patterns in ratings, technically, this isn't "movie data." It's opinion data. It's even worse with Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic data, because their aggregation and scoring algorithms move them farther from the source: actual movies. All movie analyses that use crowdrourced rating data are resting on the flawed assumption that such ratings have some inherent, meaningful relationship to movie quality.

Not familiar with this specific data, but a few years ago, the AP had a similar Economic Stress Index based on Unemployment, Bankruptcy, & Foreclosure. Could it be that these large distressed cities tend to be surrounded by smaller towns that are doing much better, thus lowering the distress level at the county level?