The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes: The most overrated metric in movies is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked — and yet has Hollywood in its grip.

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Emperor@feddit.uk⁩ to ⁨movies@lemm.ee⁩

https://www.vulture.com/article/rotten-tomatoes-movie-rating.html

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23769430

All of this would be one thing if Rotten Tomatoes were merely an innocent relic from Web 1.0 being preyed upon by Hollywood sharks. But the site has come a long way from its founding, in 1998, by UC Berkeley grads, one of whom wanted a place to catalogue reviews of Jackie Chan movies. Rotten Tomatoes outlasted the dot-com bubble and was passed from one buyer to another, most recently in 2016. That year, Warner Bros. sold most of it to Fandango, which shares a parent company with Universal Pictures. If it sounds like a conflict of interest for a movie-review aggregator to be owned by two companies that make movies and another that sells tickets to them, it probably is.

If you found this of interest, check out the related article: Online Reviews Are Being Bought and Paid For. Get Used to It

Archive link: archive.ph/lyddW

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ve noticed this phenomenon in many systems. People glom onto the only entity bothering to do benchmarks/reviews/ratings/whatever, or at least the only popular one, even if the system is totally bogus. Because where else are you gonna go?

source
- ryathal@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  In this case I think rotten tomatoes has done a reasonable job of pleasing a lot of people. Separating out audience and critics allows producers to point to their well received movies, regular people can know if they will enjoy it, people who love controversial movies can accuse others of review bombing… everyone gets to have their own version of events and rotten tomatoes gets to be the source everyone points to.
  
  source
  - brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Still, they should improve the ratings algorithm.
    
    It would be a benefit to the audience and critics, just not a benefit to them I guess.
    
    source
- JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  People glom onto the only entity bothering to do benchmarks/reviews/ratings/whatever, or at least the only popular one, even if the system is totally bogus.
  
  I don’t get any of this, really. MetaCritic and IMDB are also huge, and use alternate weighting systems, I believe. You can also just google the movie and underneath the ‘big three reviewers,’ there’ll be a bunch more quality review sites, like NYT, The Guardian, Ebert’s site and so forth.
  
  So for anyone who wants to get a spectrum of opinions, it’s really not that hard. Not unlike how one should get reliable news.
  
  source
atro_city@fedia.io ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

A third of U.S. adults say they check Rotten Tomatoes before going to the multiplex

Ah, so that's the power. I don't know what the rest of the world uses, but I've always found RT to have a shit interface --> never used it to make a decision. In fact, most streaming sites use IMDB (which is only a little more reliable than RT). RT's score can always be reliably discarded.

source
- BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  i usually go to RT after i watch a movie to see if anyone else agreed with my opinion on it. critics agreed with me on The Last Jedi. audience did not lol
  
  source
- Emperor@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I don’t use it myself. I may check out the IMDb score when I add a film to my watchlist but for anything appearing in the cinema I usually know if I’ll see it from the synopsis or trailer. I try and see every genre film and ones getting awards buzz, then anything else that looks interesting or the friend I go with fancies (The Holdovers was his pick and a good one). So I try and watch a film with minimal information and expectations.
  
  source
downpunxx@fedia.io ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Been that way for about a decade now, yes. Metacritic was an excellent user driven replacement, until they got their panties in a bunch and did away with user comment voting, now it's useless and completely enshitified.

source
- The_Che_Banana@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  See also: Yelp
  
  source
subtext@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Worth the read, including the linked 538 article about Fandango. Thanks for sharing!

source
anzo@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
IMDb is biased towards production of their owners (Amazon). I prefer tmdb.org

source
- Emperor@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’ve not noticed any great bias myself and don’t really let the rating impact my decisions. However, if I am going to move off IMDb (and I have gone all in there) then it’s likely to be to a federated service.
  
  source