Attacked by Rotten Tomatoes | Hacker News Reader

Attacked by Rotten Tomatoes

nytimes.com

72 pointsmooreds130 comments

> leading to grousing that a rotten score next to the purchase button was the same as posting this message: You are an idiot if you pay to see this movie.

> Kersplat: Paramount’s “Baywatch” bombed after arriving to a Tomatometer score of 19, the percentage of reviews the movie received that the site considered positive (36 out of 191). Doug Creutz, a media analyst at Cowen and Company, wrote of the film in a research note, “Our high expectations appear to have been crushed by a 19 Rotten Tomatoes score.”

Well yes. If your film is terrible, the reviews on sites like Rotten Tomatoes and the overall scores generated from them will reflect that. And if that's the case, people won't watch the movie.

The system works. You put out a terrible film, it got rightly bashed to pieces and people decided it wasn't worth watching as a result. That's all it comes down to; if you want to make money here, you should ideally release a decent product.

Yeah this is blaming the weatherman for the storm.

This is more like the storm blaming the weatherman for the storm. They're blaming people for noticing they're making shitty movies.

"Baywatch" is a notable achievement. They managed to make an R-rated beach movie which is neither sexy nor funny. That's hard to do.

Baywatch had a ton of potential to bring back nostalgia of the 90's and yet they went with some sort of shitty terrorist/mystery/villain story plot completely shitting all over what the baywatch tv show was all about.

Hollywood just wants to be able to make something quick with low quality and a few big names and print money. They are just crying because people don't want to see their shitty movies.

If only... It still works more often that it should. A huge number of productions of bad acting, terrible writing and copy/pasta all over the place. But they still score good.

I've yet to understand how something like transformers have so good ratings. Even as action movies they are terrible.

As long as customers still vote with their money for piles of garbages, they will release more garbage.

I was really hoping it would turn out as good as 21 jump street.

Didn't bother to see it after the reviews. Will maybe watch it on streaming someday.

I think there's some merit to complaints about rotten tomatoes. The problem with reducing a movie to a single score is different people like different things. Yeah, a score of 19 is pretty awful, so the Baywatch movie is probably bad, but some people liked it. When the whole movie is reduced to a single score, you lose the ability to figure out what audiences like a movie vs what don't, and so someone who might have actually enjoyed the movie is turned off because of all the people who don't like it.

That said, Rotten Tomatoes does provide snippets of reviews, which mitigates this issue a bit. You can skim the snippets and see why various critics liked or didn't like the movie. But I'd wager that most people don't do that, and even for the ones that do it only helps a little.

I already account for that a bit. Family movies get higher scores, gross-out comedies get lower scores.

A 74% on a fantasy horror film may mean it's pretty good.

Of course, the risk is high for buying movie tickets. The prices are too high these days for "Meh. Why not see this one?" or even, "Let's go to the movies and pick out something there."

So the studios would have a more forgiving audience if they figured out how to lower the risk that someone feels they wasted their money.

Have you looked into movie pass? We've gone 6 times in the past 3 weeks, saw 2 boring movies, 4 good ones, but only paid the single monthly cost.

Most of the price these days involved babysitting, so no. If I had a different lifestyle, I'd be very interested.

Good point haha. It's basically "The problem with reducing a movie to a single price of admission is different people like different things."

> The prices are too high these days for "Meh. Why not see this one?" or even, "Let's go to the movies and pick out something there."

Adjusted for inflation, movie ticket prices are pretty static; there's some variation, but current prices aren't abnormally high.

Adjusted for inflation, earning power is less. Taking my date to a $3 movie in 1992 was a relatively smaller investment than taking my kid to see a movie for $15 today.

> Adjusted for inflation, earning power is less. Taking my date to a $3 movie in 1992 was a relatively smaller investment than taking my kid to see a movie for $15 today.

1992 was, actually, a notably cheap year for a movies (ticket prices dropped, even before accounting for inflation, from 1990 through 1993), but even so, $3 ($5.23 in current dollars) was well below the average ticket price ($4.13; $7.21 in current dollars ) in 1992, $15 is nearly double the average ticket price (~$8.89) today.

And inflation-adjusted earning power (whether you look at median wage or median income measures), while some measures have been relatively static over the last several decades, and generally have underperformed aggregate output growth, were actually lower in 1992 than today.

See, for ticket prices, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/about/adjuster.htm

It's hard to account for nostalgia if you're not controlling for geography.

Rural/suburban theaters (built and owned on cheap land) that OP may have gone to as a child will certainly be cheaper than urban theaters (high rents) frequented as an adult.

$15 is cheap for a ticket in an urban/wealthy area.

Sure, but there is a big difference between “its much more expensive for me to go to movies now”, and “it is generally much more expensive to go to movies now”.

I used to frequent a second run theater as a kid that was $3. Iirc correctly, the first run was like $5.50.

When I worked at a big mall cineplex in the late 90s, I'm pretty sure it was $7.50. They had a weekday combo where two tickets and a small soda/popcorn was $20.

I don't have access to theater demographics, but anecdotally, the makeup of a Friday night crowd seems to skew older and have fewer groups of kids. That might be more about malls dying than movies though.

What about after I buy 12 dollars worth of popcorn and water?

The number of ultra-convenient and cheap alternatives has skyrocketed though.

> The prices are too high these days for "Meh. Why not see this one?"

So much this! I took my kid to see a movie. Two tickets, medium bucket of popcorn, a drink, some sweets: £30 ($40). (If you don't get the food and drink it comes down to about £15). In a 90 seat cinema room there were only 7 people.

I'd go far more often if they could bring the cost down a bit, even if it was only for weird times.

You're basically arguing against every movie rating system ever invented. As are the studios.

Yep. Systems that boil a movie down to a single number are fundamentally problematic. FiveThirtyEight has an article today about this topic (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/al-gores-new-movie-expo...), focusing on polarizing movies like An Inconvenient Sequel which end up with middling scores that don't properly reflect the fact that most ratings are either a 1 or a 10.

Yeah, there are better ways to represent scoring, such as Amazon's histogram of star ratings. Unfortunately, that doesn't help Rotten Tomatoes, because they often don't even have a graduated scale to measure in the source data for critics. When many critics are just recommending or not, their scale is basically 0 or 1. They are extrapolating out of much lossier source data.

This is also why I dislike Netflix's rating system. There's two axis by which it's measuring (how good the movie is, and how well it matches your interests), and turning a 4 level rating that already combined those nuances into an 8 level aggregate rating and then altering that score based on similar interests lead to quite a bit of confusion as to why something was rated the way it was. Then they doubled down and made it worse by reducing the source data rating to 2 levels and increasing the aggregated output to 100 levels. :/ The only upside is that they are able to throw some interesting compute power and algorithms and/or machine learning at it to generate some good suggestions occasionally.

The example you cite, however, is an argument for Rotten Tomatoes system; as the FiveThirtyEight article notes, the movie has a "great" 78% among critics. This is due to the RT score being a weight of reviews which have been flattened to thumbsup-thumbsdown.

Not really. It's only a "great" among critics because critics were more favorable than audiences (or rather, the movie was less polarizing for critics). But the criticisms that FiveThirtyEight has are still valid, and you can easily imagine a movie that is polarizing among critics with 50% of them giving a 10 and 50% of them giving a 1.

Middling scores are not super important. The value is on the very low scores.

I see a lot of movies in the theater. Movies like Baywatch and Emoji Movie were awful on any scale, and rotten tomato ratings will keep you away.

This whole discussion is a distraction from the larger problem -- studios are slinging out shit sandwiches as feature films. I should be getting a better film experience in a theater than on a made for Netflix movie, but I frequently don't.

For sure. I find ratings useful when looking for something middling, fun, and fairly entertaining. If I am looking for my new favorite, ratings are near useless. The average of my top 10 movies is likely lower then, say, the average marvel movie.

But that doesn't mean it's useless to look at ratings. It's just for deciding between "I guess why not" and "naw, I'd rather play a good game or something".

Video games have the exact same problem, with metacritic score being a really poor way to measure the quality of a video game. For an example how you can review video games differently look at Eurogamer - they stopped giving scores, instead, the site gives their recommendation - either "Avoid", "Recommended", "Essential" or no recommendation at all. It's a vastly better system than an absolute score out of 5 or 10.

>The problem with reducing a movie to a single score is different people like different things.

Yeh. And guess what. Newspapers and magazines have been doing it for decades. Siskel and Ebert had thumbs up/thumbs down. If you care enough to drill down to the nuance, it's there. I don't love Rotten Tomatoes all that much specifically but the numerical score by itself isn't really the issue.

Yeah, but when you're following a single reviewer, you learn their tastes and what sorts of movies you can trust their opinion of and what sorts of movies you can't. This doesn't work with aggregate rating systems.

I really liked Roger Ebert and generally agreed with his tastes although, like anyone else, he had certain preferences I didn't share and every now and then I'd be "huh." I'm petty much fine with scores I can easily drill down on these days. I couldn't name a really dependable critic whose tastes I really share--not that I've made a real effort to calibrate against the major pub critics.

I think you can learn how your tastes will align with aggregate scores too. In fact it may be easier to understand than with a single person, because the outcomes are averaged out a bit more.

Or I can read the impressions of a dozen people and fill in a lot of the blindspots that I'd have to be aware of reading the opinions of that one person. Then it doesn't matter if I can trust any particular reviewer.

I've occasionally enjoyed some low-tomatometer movies. But generally, I can see why they scored so low, and what parts of the movie I'm unusually willing to forgive. Reading a few reviews gives me enough information to see why it's low-rated.

This statistical analysis[1] of review websites suggests that the scoring and review systems everywhere but Metacritic are somewhat flawed because they do not follow a normal distribution. Of course it starts with the ground truth that movie quality follows a normal distribution, but that’s not a terribly difficult supposition in the first place.

[1]: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/whose-reviews-should-you-tru...

Ebert really didn't like having to assign a star rating to his reviews, and would have dropped it had The Chicago Sun-Times allowed him.

The problem with reducing a movie to a single score

Actually, they use two numbers, which is interesting. The most prominent one is the "TOMATOMETER", which measures the % of critics who said it's worth watching. Below that it shows the average rating.

Depends on where you look. If you're looking at rottentomatoes.com, sure. If you're looking at other services that show RT scores (e.g. movies on AppleTV) you may just be getting the critic score.

Both are the critic score, just aggregated differently. But yes, on other services you often only get one.

This is why Metacritic could be considered more accurate. While Rotten Tomatoes takes each movie review as binary--bad or good, Metacritic puts a number estimate on each review between 1 and 100--bad to good--and then averages those in.

Rotten Tomatoes is the Electoral College to Metacritic's popular vote. For all the things bad about the Electoral College, one good thing about it is that it produces more definitive results. It's a lot easier to make a decision to go see a 96% RT movie than a 8.1 MC and conversely, to avoid a 12% RT movie vs a 4.1 MC.

If I'm looking for nuance, I'll got to metacritic but if I'm just looking as a gut check, the RT score is much more helpful.

Actually there are two numbers, the Tomatometer (the critics' score) and the audience score. I just go by the critics's score; in fact, if that's higher than the audience score, that's a positive indication. I generally avoid movies where the audience score is higher. (Baywatch is a fine example, with 18% on the Tomatometer but a 60% positive rating from the audience.)

I do the opposite and it's worked well for. Some types of movies rarely do well with critics, but there is an audience for e.g. dumb comedy. I'm not one, but I love comic book movies. The user score gives me a much better idea of whether or not I'll like it because it's driven up (or down) by a bunch of people with similar taste.

> “I think it’s the destruction of our business,” Brett Ratner, the director, producer and film financier, said at a film festival this year.

The business of churning out poorly written, poorly conceived, nostalgia-opportunist, demographic-appeal driven, passionless moving picture product?

Boo-hoo.

If Rotten Tomatoes is actually having an effect, then it's taken too long. Rotten Tomatoes is an inevitable symptom of the existence of the aforementioned "business" .

Movie tickets aren't generally refundable, so there should be prior research and an expectation of satisfaction. That's how it works for pretty much any other conceivable outlay of money.

Surprising fact:

> In an absurdist plot twist, Rotten Tomatoes is owned by film companies. Fandango, a unit of NBCUniversal, which also owns Universal Pictures, has a 75 percent stake, with the balance held by Warner Bros. Fandango bought control from Warner last year for an undisclosed price.

When I last checked Rotten Tomatoes and saw a bunch of yet-another-damn-superhero movie with 90+% scores, I wondered if this was the case. Knowing that at least eight out of ten movies Hollywood puts out are riskless, brain-dead re-hashes of the usual proven plot/style formulas...and that RottenTomatoes was rating many of these "near-perfect"...that was the last time I visited RT expecting to get some help with what movie to see in theaters.

Anyone blaming Hollywood putting out mostly garbage as the source of Hollywood's woes? Netflix and the rest of the new owners of scripted video content know that you need great stuff if you're going to expect guaranteed viewership.

Critics review a movie against its own genre. And for the 'blockbuster superhero' genre The Avengers movies are generally pretty good. Not everything needs to be deep, a bit of occasional shallow fun can be just as fine :)

That argument just lowers the bar. It can be a shallow movie and also not insult my intelligence and cram product placements into every other shot. Bad filmmaking is bad. Do not make excuses for it.

> Bad filmmaking is bad. Do not make excuses for it.

Well, I'll agree with your statement, if you agree with mine:

Different people have different opinions, and you can't make an objective claim of fact about something that is purely subjective.

And I'll state my opinion that The Avengers movies are objectively good.

You obviously disagree. What now?

We seem to have reached an impasse.

Except people obviously like them, so at some point people like you just need to ignore them or ask yourselves if you're just being snooty.

And they're not "bad", says hundreds of critics and millions of moviegoers.

I totally agree. Before last year, I always had luck trusting the tomato meter before going for a movie. Especially in the last year, I realised that something had changed and movies ( especially the super hero ones ) with 90+ scores were not enjoyable at all. I have stopped trusting RT. I moved from imdb to RT about 5 years back, and now I am looking for a new source for reviews. If anybody knows of any good alternatives lemme know.

I commented on another thread with this link, but I will leave it here as well. This recently appeared on HN and suggests that Metacritic is going to give you the most accurate reviews if you assume that movie quality follows a normal distribution: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/whose-reviews-should-you-tru...

What I think it works best is following critics (professional or not) that you like and then use an aggregator (like IMDB, RT, Metacritic, etc, etc) to check what they say about a film. Algorithms can only go so far.

I use Filmaffinity, the community is fantastic. But reviews are only in Spanish.

The Rotten Tomatoes scores aren't a measure of quality, they're the percentage of critics who rated the movie at least "good" (with "good" defined rather leniently). The risk-less movies will get the best scores, because everybody agrees they're adequate by the standards of the genre. Great movies often get more polarized reviews, which means a lower score.

Although they don't make it obvious, Rotten Tomatoes also reports "Average Rating", which I think is a more useful measure for people not interested in watching merely adequate movies.

Yeah, this kind of like/dislike score is not a perfect measure of quality, especially when it comes to personal tastes. My favorite movies are consistently getting rotten scores, so I stopped even wondering why. And the movies I absolutely hated were rated high. Quite soul crushing to go there tbh :D

I find RT good at identifying bad movies, not so good at properly rating what is actually good.

Except a lot of us like those "not-another-damn-superhero' movies and they've been very well done by marvel over the last decade. If you don't like them then fine, stay away. For us who do those high scores are absolutely accurate.

Should the scores be lower simply because it's not a genre you enjoy?

I really want to go to the movies. There's nothing out I want to see right now. Heck, my friend who goes once a week hasn't been in like a month because nothing interests him.

Reminds me of how video game execs kept blaming piracy for their woes, until Valve realized it was a distribution issue. It's not rotten tomatoes, Hollywood, it's because you're putting out garbage!

I can't agree more. I grew up next to a theater and it was the thing to do. The last decent movie experince I can recall was the film print showing of the hateful eight. I didnt even like the movie itself a whole lot, but the quality, and experince were amazing. I would love to have a movie to get excited about. It all just seems like such low effort drivel now.

Yup, family and I were going to go see a movie on a whim and when we looked at the showings the only interesting movie was Dunkirk which we had already seen but contemplated seeing again.

Also ticket prices being $14+ is a little absurd.

I probably go the cinema once a year, and don't really watch much at home either, but I have some movie buff friends so I get tangential exposure to which movies are good: I just Googled what's out and the ones I've heard were very good include Dunkirk, the new Planet of the Apes, Baby Driver and The Big Sick, and Beach Rats. On top of that are the movies that I probably wouldn't enjoy seeing but that someone who likes movies would likely enjoy: Guardians of the Galaxy, Logan lucky, maybe even Wonder Woman (I just know that one's popular, but not much about how good it is).

This is just stuff that I (who doesn't even enjoy going to the movies) happen to Know about, and wouldn't mind being dragged to if a friend wanted to socialize at the cinema. I find it kind of hard to believe that "Hollywood is putting out garbage" could be true to the degree that that's the reason there's nothing you want to see.

Note that I've left out indie movies since those tend to be less accessible and more polarizing and also left out popular things like the Transformers movie.

Sure, Brett Ratner, your movies are flopping because of the review aggregator, not because of anything that those reviews might indicate...

It worked for Amy Schumer, Netflix ditched their superiour star-based system for thumbs up and down (which are now completely meaningless).

How so? The information derived from the thumbs ups/thumbs down system is conveyed to you in the form of a "XX% Match". How is that substantially different than seeing that prediction mapped to a 5-star scale?

Yeah, the percentage scale is even more useless than the stars were. I went to the effort of rating things consistently for things I watched, and it always recommended garbage to me at 98% match, things I actually liked (but saw elsewhere) showed up as like.. 60-90%.

Neither of them are particularly useful, but at least the star system usually conveyed when something is irredeemable garbage.

This is so true. What was great about the old system was Netflix showed you both the average star rating, and the star rating for people like you. Both values together provided a fairly meaningful signal. But the percentage scale isn't very helpful, and Netflix is constantly recommending garbage at high values and good stuff at lower values.

"Star rating" is at least vaguely objective, but a "recommendation score" would give Netflix more latitude to put a thumb on the scale, if a movie studio was interested in paying money to increase a movie's rating. Recommendations are ads, and people who spend more get bigger ad spots.

> irredeemable garbage

Very few movies fit into this category. "The Ridiculous 6" has a 0% (!) on RT, yet apparently enough people watched it to warrant Netflix producing more Adam Sandler movies [1]. I think the implementation of the match system is pretty awful but it is the right idea.

1. http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/24/entertainment/adam-sandler-net...

The Netflix scoring system is personalized so it doesn't outright help or harm anyone but you. They moved away from stars because it's too relative of a scale. Is 3 stars worth watching? What about 5? If I liked a movie but it wasn't amazing, do I give a 3 or a 4? Is 3 bad or median?

Since the old algorithm predicted your rating of a film based on a number of inputs, it didn't actually rely on star ratings having a consistent meaning across users, only for each individual user. It was one of the few uses for which a five-star or numeric rating system is actually valuable.

> "Sony set a review embargo of opening day for “The Emoji Movie,” which left the Tomatometer blank until after many advance tickets had been sold and families had made weekend plans."

So studios do know that the movie sucks in advance, but still blame RT for poor performance? I don't see them putting an embargo on Spider-Man...

Maybe it's just me, but I find the "Tomatometer score" to be confusing. The combination of the tomato graphic with a number confuses an otherwise obvious rating.

I have a very strong (but false) intuition that the tomato graphic is a qualifier for the rating number. i.e. "Is this saying that 92% of people would throw tomatoes at this performance? Oh it's a fresh tomato...but wait, why would they throw tomatoes if they like it. Oh I see, the tomato is a lame representation of the rating, not saying something about the rating number."

Anyway, my false intuition is so strong that I still have to concentrate to ignore the tomato and simply look at the number (even if the number itself is controversial as noted by this discussion thread).

it's called "rotten tomatoes". the tomato is rotten, e.g. more greenish colored, the worse the movie is.

i admit i was a little confused at first too.

Except that rotten tomatoes are not green..they are deeper red in color than a fresh one. Plus, why throw tomatoes at all if you like a performance. For me it's a completely broken analogy.

It doesn't help that (red == good) and (green == bad).

I look at RT if I'm on the cusp of seeing something, but sometimes I have found it inaccurate. Both my wife and I loved Dark Tower (I read the first 2 books and she had never heard of it) despite a dismal RT score[0]. If you want to see an action / sci-fi / Matrix-esque movie with some well timed jokes, I recommend it.

[0] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_dark_tower_2017/

The audience score is decent (not great, but not dismal).

I haven't see TDT yet, so I can't speak to the quality of the movie, however, liking something is not the same as thinking it is good.

There are plenty of movies that I love watching, but in no way consider well made.

I look to RT to see what's a "must see" (high critic and audience scores) or "must avoid in theaters" (low critic and low audience). Anything in between I decide like a I usually would.

The bigger issue is that of course Hollywood hates RT. It's much easier to dismiss a review than it is to make a good movie. I've also found that reviews in general have gotten way more divided (everything seems to be great or awful, not much in the middle) which I believe can be attributed to fishing for clicks. It's all speculation, but I can see middle-of-the-road reviews getting glazed over while "you must see this movie!" or "this is trash!" reviews will get the most clicks/comments/shares.

>There are plenty of movies that I love watching, but in no way consider well made

This is my problem with every review(er). They keep talking about using too many same kind of shots or how something was lit and other stuff that has in my opinion nothing to do with the actual movie.

There really should be two scores, technical score and story score. I don't care about technical aspects (almost) at all. I just care if the movie is entertaining or not. (Even the word 'entertaining' is bad to use, since some reviewers like to use it as insult i.e. 'movie was so bad it was entertaining to laugh at it')

I find aggregated (and especially RT) scores mostly useless. Aggregated scores seem to consistently reward safe, samey material over anything interesting. Below are some of my absolute favourite movies from the last 10 years with RT score. A good chunk of these I would not have seen at all if I made my viewing decision based on "the wisdom of the crowds". I've also seen all the Marvel movies - they're so fleeting that I can't even tell you what happens in most of them. Almost all are "certified fresh".

- Speed Racer (40)

- Synecdoche: New York (69)

- Arrival (94)

- Her (94)

- The Neon Demon (57)

- Mad Max: Fury Road (97)

I used to use Rotten Tomatoes to help select which movies I went to see. Recently I've seen some very highly ranked movies that I thought were terrible. "Baby Driver" was a 97% critics rank when I saw that movie (93% now) and I would put it at a 20. I don't really like personalized computer filter systems for what I see, but does anyone know of a site that rates current movies based on how you would rank other movies? What would be really great is to have a survey that would match me up with a movie critic.

> does anyone know of a site that rates current movies based on how you would rank other movies

Try criticker.com

Criticker depressed me as it finally formalised the fact that no one has a remotely comparable taste to me! Great site though!

Do you like Alien 3? I like Alien 3. It's a pretty exclusive club.

Somehow I've avoided it but will watch and report back.

Thanks. Looks good. I like how it includes old movies that I am likely not to have seen. Now I just have to hope I can find them online somewhere or that they are at the one video store left in town.

You're gonna have a hard time finding a service or critic that you agree with 100%. A miss here and there are to be expected. Or maybe check the 7% that disliked it.

Just out of curiosity recently, I looked up some of the best films ever on RT, to see if they all have 100% from critics.

Bicycle thieves [arguably the best film ever(it is amazing and does seems to top quite few best film ever lists)] does not have 100%!! David Jenkins writing for Time-Out decided to be an edge-lord hipster extraordinaire and give it a thumbs down. Just thought that was funny. The audience scores seem to be a lot more trustworthy than the reviewer ones on RT anyway, there is a lot of talk going around anyway about how Sony for example are getting 100% by letting certain 'reviewers' review the film on RT before any other reviewers.

Link to RLM guys discussing this

https://youtu.be/_HrR5X72_LM?t=9m2s

Also personally. I dont get why anyone would go to the cinema. Be at their location at a time not of your choosing, pay through the nose, get price gouged for shitty food, be subjected to 10 minutes of ads, in order to watch a mediocre film on a super-loud boomy system with terrible audio balance, in a noisy room filled with potential assholes who may block your view / break your immersion, and also you cant pause the film at any point to piss.

RunPee is a great app that gives you good times to leave for 3-6 minutes to go pee. But yes, it's a problem, and while RunPee is a solution, it's an awkward solution.

Also personally. I dont get why anyone would go to the cinema.

Some films are still better on a very big screen - I've watched Apocalypse Now on TV and then on my local film museum, which has a cinema, and it was totally worth it.

They are also cheap, don't have food, don't show ads, show good films instead of just what's new, and attract a respectful audience :)

Indeed, some films are better on the "big screen" than on a television. But that's a good reason to get an HD projector, not go to the cinema.

I've had a projector for nearly five years now, and I have never once missed going to the cinema. Instead of going out to a rather dingy venue, paying for a ticket, and having to share the space with other people who may not act respectfully of others, I can just torrent Blu-ray images for free and enjoy them in the comfort of my own home.

Gotta have big empty walls to use a projector. Some of us live in small apartments :)

You don’t have to have empty walls: decent screens are cheap (mine cost somewhere around 125€). And if I could long enjoy a big projector screen in a typical Eastern European socialist-era flat, I’m sure many others here could, too.

For the price of a good HD projector and decent surround sound system I can buy a hell of a lot of movie tickets.

How many products do you buy from Amazon that have a perfect 5 stars? 98% is effectively the same as 100%.

> 10 minutes of ads

The last couple of times I've gone to the movies the ads total over 20 minutes if you include the previews for other films! It's absurd.

good solution to industry woes: stop making shitty movies

Yes, the article reads like, "we're having trouble because people don't like our shitty movies. Not our fault. We should get rid of RT because then people won't know our movies are shitty until they pay to see them."

YMMV, but I found quite a lot of shitty movies to be rated surprisingly high on RT. Based on my experience, high rating doesn't mean a movie will be good, although low rating does translate to a pretty good chance it's poor, so the feature is half useful to me.

That has been my experience as well. Maybe you and I are unusually fussy, or maybe the fact that "fresh" just means "worth seeing" leads to inflated scores.

I totally agree. As of late, it's been gamed more often, as the article mentions. I saw Return to the Planet of the Apes because of the really high RT score, only to be sorely disappointed. I'll do my own vetting next time.

Isn't the score a function of how many people thought it was a good or bad movie, rather than an average score like Amazon reviews?

Which means you could make a "decent" movie with universal appeal (100% of reviewers give C+), that would score better than a "great" movie with really niche appeal (10% of reviewers give A+, 90% give D-)

Which makes it a good meta for "worth seeing, you'll almost certainly enjoy it", but not the best meta for "objectively the greatest crime noir ever filmed"

It's more like whether a film is worth seeing. Critics don't think talking animal movies are good. They think the kids and parents will enjoy the experience and not regret the tickets. So they all rate it "sure, see it" and it gets 95% on rottentomatoes.

I think part of the problem is I'm old now. All the plots are reruns of older plots. They were great when I was young and the plots were new to me.

I've read where television is overtaking movies as the place where you get good stories and character development. Breaking Bad, The Wire and Game of Thrones are better than any movie I've probably ever seen.

I saw Wonder Woman the other day and the only thing I liked about it was the WWI setting, and they managed to botch that too. I mean it was an OK movie, but just like every other super hero movie. Get of my lawn I guess.

"Consumer behavior is also changing. People increasingly rely on review aggregation sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor to make all kinds of spending decisions. The trend is especially visible among young people, who make up Hollywood’s most important audience."

To the degree that there's an actual trend here, I suspect this is the money quote. Siskel and Ebert did thumbs up and thumbs down but I suspect that relatively few people actually made viewing decisions based on their thumbs.

Now, many people device on many actions based on reviews. And if nothing seems all that hot this weekend? Well, there's always Netflix, Amazon, or iTunes. It's certainly cheaper and many of them have big screen TVs.

I'm not the referenced demographic but I know I'm about a one/year movie viewer in theaters when I have the time and deem something worthy of the IMAX treatment.

Do that many people really rely on reviews? I've found I trust them significantly less with movies than I do with many things.

I wish I could remember some specific details, but some incredible films are given ridiculously low ratings within Netflix itself.

I don't even bother with Rotten Tomatoes anymore because it's seemed like such a crap-chute for so long.

If I know I really want to see something, then I'll just see it in the theatre. If I miss it, or I'm less thrilled but still want to give it a go then I wait until it's out on an ubiquitous source like Netflix or I'll rent it.

---

(Speaking of IMAX I'm really upset right now because I tried to book free tickets for a TIFF screening of Dunkirk attended by Christopher Nolan at the Ontario Place Cinesphere[0], but their site wasn't working well the day of the bookings and I couldn't get through!)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinesphere

I don't know. I definitely do even if I take them with a very large grain of salt. I'm usually watching them when they come out on DVD though so I also pre-filter a lot based on Oscar nominations as well as "Doesn't seem like the sort of movie I'd like."

I also watch few enough movies that I'll also tend to read the reviews of a couple major media critics before I rent/buy something.

[ADDED: I mostly start with metacritic but not so much as a recommendation engine but to get a quick look at a movie I've already decided looks interesting.]

Dunkirk Spoilers: I feel like Rotten Tomato doesn't work all the time. I watched Dunkirk, excited from the 93% on RT, and I walked out and felt disappointed. Like I get the cinematography was great, the story structure is amazing, everything a critic should be looking for was all there, but did I enjoy it? No. I thought it was boring. The movie didn't do anything to foster the relation of characters to the audience. I frankly didn't care about any of them, maybe except the Captain that stayed behind to help the French. I personally thought this was Nolan's weakest movie, although the RT score would suggest otherwise: Inception - 86%, Interstellar - 71% both of which I enjoyed way more than Dunkirk.

I think the audience score also on RT is more telling: Inception - 91% Interstellar - 85% Dunkirk - 82%

We could also take movies that people mentioned on this thread: The Dark Tower - RT: 16%, AS: 54% Baby Driver - RT: 93%, AS: 89% Baywatch - RT: 18%, AS: 60%

I also don't trust critics on the basis of people like Armond White, and since many of them do this for a living, a lot of critics can be bought.

I think what I'm trying to say is that Rotten Tomato is actually inaccurate metric for how enjoyable the movie actually is, and consumers are being misguided.

I also think theres an inherent misunderstanding of the RT score. People look at the score and think this is the quality of the movie, when in reality I think of it as a probability that I would like the movie. A score of 50% doesn't mean the movie has a failing grade, it's that when 100 critics viewed it half the critics enjoyed it and the other half didn't, so there's probably a 50% chance that I'll enjoy the movie.

I can't believe Wonder Woman got 92%. It was one of the worst superhero movies I have ever seen. The dumbest story and the plot, the dumbest dialogue, subpar action and CGI, very mediocre acting. There are a few okay jokes in it, I admit, but that's about it.

Same with John Wick: Chapter 2. 90%, dumb as a bag of bricks.

You have to take 15-20% off for issue movies. Wonder Woman ended up being a stealth one.

John Wick is respected as a "craft" movie because of its stuntwork and fight choreography. Same as Dunkirk and The Revenant, but those were appreciated on cinematography, etc.

So, yes, movies loved for their craftsmanship do tend to outperform the quality of their storytelling.

> I can't believe Wonder Woman got 92%. It was one of the worst superhero movies I have ever seen.

Not even having seen Wonder Woman, I can easily believe the 92% score—plenty of people I know who saw it, really loved it. If I saw it and didn't like it, maybe I would be surprised that so many of my friends liked it, but I still wouldn't be surprised that it got a high rating, because they did.

> I think the audience score also on RT is more telling: Inception - 91% Interstellar - 85% Dunkirk - 82%

This is like the arguments you get with computer game scores being out of 100% or out of 5, or when you try to compare percentages (e.g. this game got 95% which means it's better than this game which got 93%). Things like this are so subjective you really should only be looking at whether most people thought it was bad, good or great, plus if it's in a genre you like. Someone might love Inception but just not like Interstellar because they don't like sci-fi.

I address this at the end:

> I also think theres an inherent misunderstanding of the RT score. People look at the score and think this is the quality of the movie, when in reality I think of it as a probability that I would like the movie. A score of 50% doesn't mean the movie has a failing grade, it's that when 100 critics viewed it half the critics enjoyed it and the other half didn't, so there's probably a 50% chance that I'll enjoy the movie.

It's the quality of movies, and also we're living during Peak Televsion. TV shows have an awesome capability to tell really long stories, that go further in depth than movies can.

For a lighthearted take on it, watch "Fk You, it's January!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H18RUB1cxfI

Really? My personal experience with RT is that during the weeks that the movie is actually playing in the theatres, the rating is over inflated. So much that I stopped trusting it.

Take for example “Wind River”. The current score is 84%. You would expect to see an awesome movie for 84%, but it is nothing more than average.

For comparison the movie Gladiator has a score of 76%, and the “The Wolf of Wall Streer” 77%.

This is garbage. Rotten Tomatoes are way too positive IMO. I have wasted good money on 95+/95+ movies only to find they were absolute rubbish. A good recent example is John Wick 2. I really like the first one, and based on the RT score I didn't think twice about going to watch the second. Only to find it was the most mind-numbing continuous violence I could even imagine, without the noir of the first one. And there were a string of similar movies that got unbelievable scores only to be absolutely average.

Yes some get terrible scores, and probably deserve it. But the worst crime is all these big blockbuster movies that are rated 98/99 and should be somewhere in the 60s or 70s.

My solution - just don't go to the movies, it has become an ongoing disappointment and waste of time. Wait for some critical YouTube reviews that actually analyse and explain in some depth why a movie is good or bad then maybe consider getting it on DVD or something.

Personally I like to look at https://www.cinemascore.com/ as I tend to trust audience surveys a touch more than the critics. I do look at Rotten Tomatoes also. The problem with RT to me is that if all the critics are slightly negative than it gets 0%, all slightly positive it is 100%. The percentage score isn't really nuanced on how bad or how good the movie is. At least that is how my understanding of how the system works.

One of the worst cases for me was the movie Drive: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/drive_2011

Terrible movie in my opinion, but critics just loved it so 93% RT positive. But Cinemascore gave it a C-, which is a terrible score and the way I felt.

Just an odd note, I agree with a lot of the comments on this thread, but I thought Drive was a fantastic movie.

I saw it in the cinema and remember my heart was rushing from all the emotion after seeing it. I could hear the soundtrack in my head for days afterwards (it may be the best part of the movie for me). Drive's easily in my top 10 of the last decade.

Maybe my taste is just strange.

Or maybe my taste is strange. I saw it in the theater and was very bored. I was tempted to leave the theater midway through, but watched the whole film.

They mentioned King Arthur. I didn't want to see it after seeing the RT score, but my wife saw it anyway, and now says it's one of her favorite movies.

We both decided to see the new Planet of the Apes because of it's 90+ RT score, and both absolutely hated the movie.

It seems that to be a studio exec is to be out of touch. In what rarified world should people have to pay for the derivative crap they push? I think Hollywood's understanding of technology from TIVO to streaming is generally terrible.

Hollywood had a terrible summer because they made a lot of movies nobody wants to see. This summer's films were all awful or too derivative and predictable.

Its not that Rotten Tomatoes is solely at fault for pointing out that movies are low quality, its that Netflix now provides a very simple alternative!

Before, if you wanted to see a movie, you'd settle for the best of the worst and still show up to the theatre. Now, the alternative of binging a new series or some other hosted content is likely far more appealing.

Netflix personalizes rating scores (based on your ratings). Rotten tomatoes should implement that instead.

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/whose-reviews-should-you-tru...

This was posted here a week or so ago, but seems relevant.

My opinion of RT went down significantly when I tried to actually login and post a review. It is so horrible to use, I'm now convinced the site is deliberately setup to favour bots over real people.

This is absolutely true. I've seen a few movies recently with some self pronounced critics and we were amazed at how good the movies were that were rated horrifically low.

I was stunned that they gave Captain Underpants a 87. Audience score was only 64.

Movie was awesome though!

Rating are nothing new. Seems like the old paper TV Guide had ratings in it.

In related news, Ford Motor Company blames Connecticut attorney Ralph Nader for poor Pinto sales...

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