Why are there ratings for unreleased films?

Jason: There are several possible ways that a film could have the keyword "unreleased-film" yet have received votes.The film was bootlegged or distributed online without authorization of the filmmakers (examples: The Fantastic Four (1994) and The Sweatbox (2002)).The film is legally available yet without having had a proper release, which is the case for Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971) (TV) which can be viewed at the Paley Center for Media.The film was suppressed from a proper release, yet occasional screenings were legally allowed, which is the case for the documentary about the Rolling Stones which I'll refer to as "CS Blues". (See https://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/2013/10/scandalous_rolling_stones_film.html for an article about a public screening.)The film is not itself an unreleased film; rather, it's about an unreleased film, so the keyword "unreleased-film" is ambiguous, which seems to be the situation for Der Clown (2016) (TV) and The Story of ... The Day the Clown Cried (2016), both of which are about the same film.I don't know the situation for all of the titles on the list, but I suspect that one of these explanations would apply to many of them.

I believe a lot of IMDb users rate thousands of titles they have never seen. That probably includes most of IMDb's "Top 1000 Voters" (who show up in their own special category on the ratings pages). I have seen other evidence of similar things on IMDb. For example, sometimes it can take years for a title to reach five ratings, but as soon as the fifth rating occurs and the average rating is made public, other ratings start to show up on that title immediately. This suggests to me that some users are just in search of titles to rate, without having ever watched them. Their most common rating in these instances is "5." They may even be using bots to do their ratings so they can stay in the Top 1000 Voters. And by the way, I will add that it's a similar story for the keyword "lost-film," including for titles that were lost many decades ago, in some cases films lost more than 100 years ago. lost-film (2851 titles)