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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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