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Comment by coloneltcb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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