Don’t Blame the Critics: More Attacks on Rotten Tomatoes

Posted on August 5, 2017 at 8:00 am

Rotten Tomatoes is named after one of the earliest forms of criticism. Audiences who did not like what they were watching on stage would hurl rotten tomatoes at the actors. The most popular aggregator of movie reviews is successful because moviegoers enjoy the opportunity to look at the thoughts of a range of critics. Movie studios are delighted with Rotten Tomatoes when they can brag about a 90% “fresh” rating, but when the rating is not good and the movie does not do well, they accuse the site of being superficial or without nuance or trying to tell people what to think.

Of course, even a terrible rating won’t keep people from buying tickets if they do not care about a movie’s quality. So films based on video games (which often are not even shown to critics in time for reviews) will make a profit. And a film like “The Emoji Movie,” one of the worst-reviewed of the summer, did very well at the box office, at least in its first week of release. When that happens, we get the “Does Rotten Tomatoes matter” stories. We’re with longtime box office analyst, ComScore’s Paul Dergarabedian: “The best way for studios to combat the ‘Rotten Tomatoes Effect’ is to make better movies, plain and simple.”

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Critics

Is it the Critics’ Fault if People Don’t Go to the Movie?

Posted on June 12, 2017 at 2:31 am

They’re blaming the critics again. Quartz’s Ashley Rodriguez writes:

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Baywatch were never going to be critical darlings. The former is the fifth film in a franchise that should have been retired years ago, if Hollywood had any mercy at all. And the other is an action-comedy about lifeguards. Enough said. Both movies led the domestic box office to its worst Memorial Day weekend showing in nearly 20 years.

In the fallout, are Hollywood producers blaming the writers? The actors? Themselves? (Of course not.) No, they are reportedly blaming Rotten Tomatoes.

They say the movie-review site, which forces critics to assign either a rotten or fresh tomato to each title when submitting reviews, regardless of the nuances of their critiques, poisoned viewers against the films before they were released.

Don’t kill the messenger. If people want to show a little caution before spending the money for a movie ticket by checking with a trusted critic or even a quick look at an aggregate score, then that is their right. If the studios do not like the reviews, they should make better movies. The fact that the audience score is almost always higher than the critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes is due to a selection bias; the people who buy tickets for a film do so because they think they will like it and once they’ve spent the time and money they are literally invested in the film. More important, that score is on Rotten Tomatoes for any potential ticket-buyer who would like to be guided by it.

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Is “Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever” the Worst Movie of All Time?

Posted on November 24, 2015 at 10:29 am

It was a lot of fun to talk to Libby Coleman about “Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.” In an article for Ozy, Coleman says that by one standard it is the worst film of all time (or at least since the internet began keeping track) — it has 115 negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and not a single critic recommended it, rare unanimity in the scrappy and contentious critic community. Of course, there are legendarily awful films like “The Room,” “Troll 2,” and “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” but “Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever” is truly terrible. I’m glad my friend Michelle Alexandria, the movie’s only fan, is quoted in the piece as well.

This is as much of the movie anyone should ever watch.

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture

Comic-Con 2015: My Rotten Tomatoes and Common Sense Media Panels

Posted on July 16, 2015 at 8:07 am

I was thrilled to be invited to be on two of the best panels at Comic-Con. Every year, movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives attendees the chance to talk back to the critics at “Your Opinion Sucks!” Each person is given a paddle with a ripe tomato on one side and a rotten tomato on the other. Attendees have sixty seconds to explain why the critics are wrong about a movie and then the critics have a chance to respond and the whole crowd indicates their views with the paddles. The result is raucous, passionate, and very funny. Everyone who got up to speak had some defenders with the possible exception of the guy who, over the objections of his girlfriend, wanted to tell us why he didn’t like “Inside Out.” Scott Mantz of “Access Hollywood” went so ballistic that I had to explain to the crowd that it was Lewis Black controlling his brain. The glamorous, gorgeous, witty, and all-around magnificent Grae Drake is out in the audience talking to the crowd, and Top Tomato Matt Atchity does his best to moderate the very immoderate panel of critics.

This was the first time my friends at Common Sense Media had a panel at Comic-Con and I was honored to be invited to participate. The topic was “Fandom: The Next Generation” and we talked about whether and how to get kids interested in their parents’ nerdy, geeky passions. We had a surprise guest star: Agent Coulson himself, Clark Gregg of “The Avengers” and “Agents of Shield” — and father of a 13-year-old. All of us on the panel are parents, and three of us had our children in the room. The conclusion: kids are, thankfully, their own people and we should be open to whatever their own nerdy, geeky choices are as we share our own. I got a big kick out of one of the attendees who came over to me after the panel, an adult woman whose father was wearing an “Incredibles” shirt because they love to cosplay together.

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Festivals

Critic Critiques — Has the Internet Been Good or Bad for Movie Criticism?

Posted on January 14, 2015 at 3:46 pm

Until a few years ago, the movie critics you read were determined by geography. There were a few critics in national publications, like Pauline Kael in the New Yorker and the critics for Time and Newsweek. If you lived in Chicago, you got to read Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, but if you did not, you read the critic in your local paper. The internet made it possible to read any critic you liked. And it made it possible for anyone to be a critic. I started putting my movie reviews online in 1995 and did not start getting paid for it until five years later.

This democratization of movie criticism has been both good and bad. The worst part has been the result of overall budget-slashing at news organizations across the board. Film critics are among the first to go. A documentary called “For the Love of Movies” was a sad elegy to the era of the professional movie critic.

Director David Cronenberg is especially critical of aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. He said

Even now if you go to Rotten Tomatoes, you have critics and then you have ‘Top Critics’, and what that really means is that there are legitimate critics who have actually paid their dues and worked hard and are in a legitimate website connected perhaps with a newspaper or perhaps not. Then there are all these other people who just say they’re critics and you read their writing and they can’t write, or they can write and their writing reveals that they’re quite stupid and ignorant. … Some voices have emerged that are actually quite good who never would have emerged before, so that’s the upside of that. But I think it means that it’s diluted the effective critics.

It is clear to me that the best part of this access to technology by both critics and filmgoers (and thus the dissolving of the distinction between them) has been the range of new voices. My friend Sonny Bunch wrote for the Washington Post:

there is some use in examining the way that the movies themselves help us order our existence. The movie screen may not be a mirror for society. But it can be a roadmap for understanding and navigating it. And the non-expert may sometimes, even often, be better equipped to help us travel that path than the expert.