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
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Even if Rotten Tomatoes wasn’t being manipulated by production companies, looking at a score aggregator is such a bad way for people to judge movies.
A movie where ten critics go “It was fine I guess.” would score 100%. A movie where seven critics said “This is the best movie ever.” but three said they didn’t care for it would score a 70%.
Shallow crowd pleasers with no sharp edges are going to have such an easier time scoring highly than well made but niche movies.
It just seems like a situation of industrializing the concept of enjoying media to assign it scores in, essentially a void (because honestly most people just check the numbers instead of reading the reviews making them up.)
Plus, there’s always a chance that you’ll like the movie, even if 10 “critics” didn’t, if a movie sounds interesting enough for you to read reviews, perhaps give it a try no matter what other people think of it.
I miss when Roger Ebert was alive. I could just check his opinion, and it would 99% of the time tell me whether a movie was worth watching.
Trying to find a good barometer these days is really hard.
Whenever I check for a movie on RT, I go towards the capsule reviews of critics, never just the superficial score in big bold numbers.
Any metric that becomes a goal.
