Rotten Tomatoes Is Destroying the Film Industry

[kaypain]

A good chunk of people will take the word of someone who gets paid to criticize things as opposed to a rando on the internet.

That's unfortunately true.

People are sheep regardless

 

[FunkMiller]

Personally, I've always found RT to be a pretty decent barometer of a film's quality or otherwise. It's rare I'll see a movie, and then see the RT score and disagree with it completely. Sure, it's not exact, and shouldn't be the only source you use when deciding on what movies to view, but it's still has its merits. I'm yet to see RT get a movie so horrifically wrong that it blows its usefulness out of the water.

 

[jmc]

It's laughable to me when people are called sheep for listening to opinions. All of you choose to listen to the opinion of friends and family for various items, tech products, restaurants, music, movies, TV, book, whatever, by listening to their recommendations you are part of the very heard of sheep you claim others are for listening to someone who critiques for a living. If you go to a tech friend and ask them what do they think about the new iPhone before buying it that's you doing the exact same thing as people reading RT reviewers. This notion that listening to film critics is any different is kinda ridiculous.

 

[Kahran Ramsus]

It's laughable to me when people are called sheep for listening to opinions. All of you choose to listen to the opinion of friends and family for various items, tech products, restaurants, music, movies, TV, book, whatever, by listening to their recommendations you are part of the very heard of sheep you claim others are for listening to someone who critiques for a living. If you go to a tech friend and ask them what do they think about the new iPhone before buying it that's you doing the exact same thing as people reading RT reviewers. This notion that listening to film critics is any different is kinda ridiculous.

Those railing against Rotten Tomatoes might as well be criticizing Tripadvisor, Google Reviews, Yelp, Amazon Reviews, Ebay Reviews, etc. as well.

 

[Darepool]

Even Michelin stars.

 

[jmc]

Those railing against Rotten Tomatoes might as well be criticizing Tripadvisor, Google Reviews, Yelp, Amazon Reviews, Ebay Reviews, etc. as well.

Exactly, I mean, we all value the opinions of others to make choices in our lives, there's is not one person on this board crapping on people who look at RT as a guide who haven't also looked for other opinions in making a specific choice in life. We're all sheep, in one way or another.

 

[DarthSkywalker]

Complaining about RT feels a lot like a need for approval for the fandom you choose.

 

[Yowza]

I think a big problem is the percent rating too often gets inferred as a 1-10 scale quality rating when really a 20% means the "aggregate" (lets call it that cause rottentomatoes defines what their aggregate is and too often than not there's a movie with less than 10 critical reviews) is amount of critics gave a thumbs up or down not that percent quality rating is 2/10 by everyone.

So there's 2 problems misperception on tomatoscore (which often contrasts significantly with audience scores) means as well as a loosely defined "aggregate" that sometimes doesn't even include more than 10 scores if an older movie, smaller scale film, or foreign film. It's a dumping ground bandwagon site is what it is.

 

[TheVileOne]

People complain about Rotten Tomatoes when it's a low rating for a movie you care about, but when it turns out to be surprisingly high fans are falling over themselves to gush over how great it is.

It's been that way here for years. Posters here waiting for Rotten Tomato reviews to pop up with baited breath for all the big releases.

 

[Yowza]

I wonder if all the studio execs behind these big releases are doing the same thing to a certain degree.

 

[TheVileOne]

Of course they are. Those studios are ready to fall over themselves to market the Tomato Meter rating on everything these days. It gets put on DVD and Blu-ray covers now. It's on press releases.

 

[Neno_Kos]

I'll say rotten tomato certainly doesnt help with mixed review movies, which are usually most divisive movies. and when 50% of critics say it isnt good, majority of audience will say it's a bad movie and wont go see it. And those kind of movies get hurt the most on box office.

You can say "but you also got 50% of positive critics reviews" argument. No. Cause in that case it still means movie is "rotten" and not "fresh" by their standards. So do you see where I am heading here?

Sure, dont go watch bad movies. Sure those movies are truly bad and you can wait to spend your money on better movie. But today, mixed pretty much on rotten score means you dont have a good movie. And if critics, majority of them dont like it, like more than 61% exactly. You are fu*** literally.

 

[metaphysician]

If a movie can't even convince more than half the critics its at least minimally decent? It almost certainly *is* crap.

 

[daddydivine]

I notice that when a movie is either extremely high or low I tend to agree with RT. Only the mixed scores have me thinking of seeing a movie for myself. RT seems to work for me. But I can understand if someone becomes disillusioned after loving a movie that has a 27 Rotten score.

 

[Ivan Drago]

People who say they don't care about RT are secretly the ones who care about it the most.

 

[Warhammer]

*citation needed*

Or to be more precise: how about actually making an argument rather than just going "No"?

 

[Neno_Kos]

del

 

[Evil Twin]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with gathering information, even if it's highly subjective, on a movie from someone who has actually seen it and making a decision to spend money on it as a result. Anyone that says otherwise is taking an absurd position.

Now RT is obviously flawed. Not all critics are created equal. Even among the "top critics". And a critic from the New York Times may very well have different criteria than one from Fangoria. A 90% 3 star review is not necessarily better than a 75% 5 star reviewed film. And it's certainly silly to use numbers without reading the reviews which may have nuance.

But most of that is on the reading audience. The average person now has access to far more reviews than ever before. In the old days you might have easy access to your local newspaper critic, Siskel and Ebert, and possibly a couple of magazine critics (notably Pauline Kael) before a film opened. You can literally read hundreds of reviews now.

If anything is the problem it's critics reading other reviews and tweets before writing their reviews. It's easy for groupthink and pack mentality to form as a response.

 

[Greens]

It's laughable to me when people are called sheep for listening to opinions. All of you choose to listen to the opinion of friends and family for various items, tech products, restaurants, music, movies, TV, book, whatever, by listening to their recommendations you are part of the very heard of sheep you claim others are for listening to someone who critiques for a living. If you go to a tech friend and ask them what do they think about the new iPhone before buying it that's you doing the exact same thing as people reading RT reviewers. This notion that listening to film critics is any different is kinda ridiculous.

A lot of these people were burned once or twice when a movie they really liked was blasted on Rotten Tomatoes (BvS) so now the whole site is trash.

 

[FunkMiller]

A lot of these people were burned once or twice when a movie they really liked was blasted on Rotten Tomatoes (BvS) so now the whole site is trash.

Yes, that's pretty much the rather obvious elephant in the room in this thread, isn't it? The only people I tend to hear criticising RT a lot are the BvS fans... which is understandable, I suppose.

 

[Apollo]

I despise Rotten tomatoes scoring. There are so many movie I like that get a rotten score.

I think they should combine both the critics score and the audience score into a third average score. This score should then be the main score shown for the movie.

For Example

Power Rangers has a 48% rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes. This is the main score shown on the left side of the screen and is shown when you Google or Bing it. This is ridicules because the movie as a whole shouldn't be that low.

Then we have the Audience score and it is 78%!!

Add 48% to 78% and divide by 2 and you have an average score of 63%

I think giving Power Ranger a main score a fresh rating of 63% is the fair thing to do. I really hope Rotten Tomatoes adopts this into their scoring one day.

 

[Ivan Drago]

The audience score on RT is worthless and broke. People shouldn't care about that.

 

[Kahran Ramsus]

The audience score on RT is worthless and broke. People shouldn't care about that.

Not only are random schmucks able to create multiple sock puppets to influence the vote (the same reason IMDB ratings aren't very reliable), but they automatically mark any votes for "Want to See" as a positive (which is just ludicrous).

The audience score is almost completely useless, and I don't bother paying attention to it for a second. I go to RT to see what legitimate critics have to say, not trolls and fanboys.

 

[jmc]

I despise Rotten tomatoes scoring. There are so many movie I like that get a rotten score.

I think they should combine both the critics score and the audience score into a third average score. This score should then be the main score shown for the movie.

For Example

Power Rangers has a 48% rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes. This is the main score shown on the left side of the screen and is shown when you Google or Bing it. This is ridicules because the movie as a whole shouldn't be that low.

Then we have the Audience score and it is 78%!!

Add 48% to 78% and divide by 2 and you have an average score of 63%

I think giving Power Ranger a main score a fresh rating of 63% is the fair thing to do. I really hope Rotten Tomatoes adopts this into their scoring one day.

The problem is the audience score can be grossly inflated by zealous fans.

 

[I SEE SPIDEY]

There is not one thing wrong with RT. The fanboys and fangirsl reaction to it is hiliarious though.

Exactly.