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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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