Is Rotten Tomatoes Killing the Movie Industry? No, Bad Movies Are

Perhaps it's a reliable filter of movies that are "so bad it makes you feel physically ill" - but would anyone have recommended those films for you?

I recommend you get your film recommendations elsewhere, ignoring RT unless it's sub 10%. That's approximately what I do.

MetaCritic is owned by CBS

Looks like this controversial for some reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_Tomatoes

"since January 2010 has been owned by Flixster, which was, in turn, acquired in 2011 by Warner Bros. In February 2016, Rotten Tomatoes and its parent site Flixster were sold to Comcast's Fandango. Warner Bros. retained a minority stake in the merged entities"

Rotten Tomatoes now uses 'Top Critics' to compile their overall score instead of 'All Critics'. This distinction didn't originally exist.

I helped produce a short film called Confidential Informant. We poured our hearts and wallets into the film. I am very proud of the result. We (sort of, I'm currently in college so I have been reduced to editing scripts, crafting one pagers, and sitting on conference calls) are about to set out on a few more endeavors and quality, originality, and financial success for our investors and contractors is paramount. We hire quality over quantity. We want to make good movies that make enough money to make more.

I write all this to highlight two points: it is not just mindless recreations and rebrands out there (I have to believe that we are not the only indy guys who want to make good pictures) and there is good content out there, but like all good things you must work to find it.

When I get tipsy and hopeful, I dream of seeking funding from the likes of HN folks (y'all definitely talk like you could afford to invest in low budget pictures) instead of the withered, myopic folks who do the bulk of investing now. Film is risky, and people want guaranteed ROI. The climate is such that people want guaranteed winners and few will take risks on unknown quantities, directors, scripts and production companies alike.

Sorry for the ramble, but every time I hear someone complain about the state of film these days, my first response is, "what are you willing to do to change that?"

If anyone is interested in getting involved with a small and hungry production company hit me up. We don't need you to win but we'd love to have you.

Those are present in modern movies, and I agree to your characterization of the Marvel franchise etc, but you seem to be randomly going to various movies and suffering from that?

I find it's more consistent to have a few favorite directors, with which work you have a longer term relationship, and understand better. E.g. I'd go to any David Fincher movie, and 95% of the time I wont be disappointed even if they vary widely in subject and scope (B.Button was kind of a flop).

And of course lots more obscure directors (someone like Hal Hartley or ‎Kar-Wai Wong for me) with consistent quality.

The industry really needs to take at-home seriously.

Thus leading to those "trends" people get faux-excited for (I say that as they completely forget the 'hype' over previous ones when the next one hits) and masking the problem in the first place.

Anyways, "safe but boring" is finance's bread and butter, so looking to big-budget flicks to take risks in the pursuit of good art is a lost cause. They only care insofar as they can get emmy attention to up sales.

I have literally never heard someone say this

>(besides the complaints you hear about prices)

Yup, there it is.

But also, to watch a movie in the cinema I often have to sit in uncomfortably off-center chairs. I can't adjust the volume if I think it's too loud, I can't pause the movie to take a piss and I have to listen to the troglodytes behind me eat popcorn with their mouths open. The movies start at rigidly defined times that may not be convenient for me, I'm not allowed to bring a pizza in, I can't do anything about it if someone has an inconsolable baby or kicks the back of my chair repeatedly and to top it all off there's half an hour of ads before the movie starts.

And yeah, I have to pay $15 for that.

All in all, cinema is still a very 1920's experience, and I don't really want that. I have a 3D home projector man, I got it second hand for like $200. It's not as good as the cinema projector, but I assure you my couch is nicer. I've just delayed my cinema schedule by 6 months. Spiderman: Homecoming is being released soon, I'm pumped. No spoilers please.

Spiderman homecoming got a 92% from critics and 89% from fans because people got what they expected from the movie. The Hitman's Bodyguard on the other hand rated poorly 38%:71% because it failed to deliver.

And really, general ratings need to be in the context of the kind of person that might like the movie.

I've just finished watching for the second time a non-bland and pretty-offensive (at least for today's sensibilities) 1997 comedy starring Jamie Foxx and Vivica Fox, among others. It's called "Booty Call". It has a 5.3 rating on IMDB (which is comparatively speaking pretty low) and only 25% on RT (which I guess is even lower). It doesn't matter, because this movie has made me laugh so hard that I literally had tears in the corners of my eyes and my stomach-muscles were beginning to hurt because of all the laughing. And remember, this was the second time when I was watching it, but I was still laughing my a.s off.

Now, I thought that maybe I'm the crazy one out, a stupid viewer who doesn't understand interesting and thought-provoking movies and who only laughs at "stupid" movies, but when I went to the movie's comment page on IMDB (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118750/reference) I saw that I was not alone in this, all the top comments were giving the movie a rating between 8 and 10 and the commenters were mentioning how hard they had laughed while watching it.

The conclusion is that there is something definitely wrong with the way some movies are rated. I'm not sure if there exists a fix for that, apart from us, the "normal" viewers, just starting to ignore reviews and movie-critics and then watching movies with no preconceptions.

"Happiness" is none of those things, and scored 85 on RT.

> It is safer to invest in the next mediocre superhero movie that most people will be fine with than an innovative middle budget drama that might have a harder time finding an audience. That is what is hurting the movie industry.

That, I completely agree with.

The "innovative middle budget drama[s]" are moving to television. The rise of high-quality programming on cable TV has a lot to do with the state the film industry is currently in.

I find it fascinating that ever since television launched, film has gone out of its way to be different from TV, but the specific way it does that constantly changes. Back in the '70s, it was the opposite from where it is today!

With the exception of critics, most people watch movies that they expect they will enjoy. If that movie meets or exceeds expectations, it'll be fresh.

Through this perspective, the way to get a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating isn't to make a bland, lowest-common-denominator film, attempting to appeal a little bit to everyone. Rather, it's to make a film that a small niche of people will be enthralled by, and market the film in such a way to attract that audience, and no other audience.

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Conversely, when a movie is rotten, it didn't merely fail the average viewer, it failed for the people who were excited to see exactly that movie.

So much this. Also conversely I don't understand how the tyranny of the average issue for polarising movies is not brought up more. Many movies I like aren't obviously appreciated by everyone (too gritty, too awkward, too dumb, too sci-fi...) and end up in the 40-70% range which tells me nothing.

No, they think that they have to do this, but they are demonstrably wrong, as proven by e.g. the "surprise" success of a movie like "Get Out" (which is really excellent, BTW) which breaks all of those rules and makes a ton of money because people can still recognize a good movie even though Hollywood generally can't.

(Completely agree with you that making something with the widest possible audience appeal will be very bland and uninspiring)

The real end of the New Hollywood era, though, was the release of Star Wars in 1977. It paved the way for the sci-fi/fantasy blockbuster. It turned into a successful trilogy, and overlapped team-wise with Spielberg's fantastically successful Raiders of the Lost Ark. Hollywood, and movie fans, lost interest in the more intellectual fare of New Hollywood, in favor of kid-friendly, cross-marketing-friendly entertainment.

So it's not surprising that there was a dropoff in critical darlings after the 1970s. Movies got a lot worse - they really did. Even directors who carried on the New Hollywood traditions, like David Lynch and the Coen brothers, couldn't see the kind of success the 1970s directors had.

Of course, before the New Hollywood era, Hollywood kinda stunk, big expensive extravaganzas. Critical attention then turns to the French New Wave, and other post-WWII European film with small budgets and big emotional punches (who makes a movie like Wages of Fear these days?).

I wonder how our current era will fare? I'm thinking about the sort of epic-story serialization that the Marvel franchise and the reinvigorated Star Wars franchise is doing. How will that be viewed?

Well millions and millions of other people do, so why should the movie companies cater to you instead?

Making a sequel of that thing means only the people who watched [AND LIKED] the first thing will watch the second one, also ensuring top tier ratings, making more people want to see what makes it so great.

Having original movies is a true blessing; but sequels, remakes, novel and comic book movies are true "office box smashes" with very, very little to risk.

The problem is that your local multiplex is not going to be showing independent films, nor are they going to be blasting marketing cranked up to 11 on all channels, so it's much harder to hear about them, and in some cases, much harder to see them period.

But the scene is alive and well - I've gotten a lot more into over the past year or so, and have really enjoyed it. The accessibility is poor in some places (in the middle of Manhattan is pretty great), but absolutely worth it.

I find IMDB and Metacritic to give pretty solid coverage of these films, so that alleviates some of the discoverability problems.

If you have small theaters near you, please patronize them - better yet, convince a group to go regularly. They need the business, and I think you'll find a lot of worthy films.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blumhouse_Productions

In 2016, U.S./Canada box office was $11.4 billion, up two percent from $11.1 billion in 2015. Admissions, or tickets sold (1.32 billion), held steady compared to 2015. Moviegoer Trends  More than two-thirds (71%) of the U.S./Canada population – or 246 million people – went to the cinema at least once in 2016, a two percent increase from 2015. Frequent moviegoers – individuals who go to the cinema once a month or more – continue to drive the movie industry, accounting for 48 percent of all tickets sold in the United States and Canada.  The number of frequent moviegoers increased in 2016. However, the number of tickets purchased by frequent moviegoers decreased. This was offset by an increase in the tickets purchased by occasional moviegoers (moviegoers who attended less than once a month).

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/business/media/rotten-tom...

That's pretty interesting. TV used to be the home for schlock and quality story telling was mostly done by movies. These days, if you want to tell a substantial story with depth, you do it on television. Movies are to television as short stores are to novels.

And for all the talk about data-driven decisions, it looks to me as if Amazon and Netflix are increasingly shifting to throw a lot of stuff against the wall and see what sticks themselves. Nothing wrong with that necessarily. It's basically how VCs work :-)

Hollywood has a collection of processes that allow people with little experience in telling stories to influence how said stories are told, and then those who come after have to deal with the fallout. It is more than a little gross.

Nothing kills a movie quite like a bad script. You can pair up a lot of very similar winners and losers and see that the key difference is the script. Compare for example Baywatch and 22 Jump Street. Both rehashed Gen-X era TV shows about good-looking people. 22 Jump Street was smart, self-aware, and successful.

Since few bombs do have good scripts, you would think studio execs would simply never put a weak script into production. While you can have a successful film with a shitty script, why risk it? Especially given how cheap it is to change a script early on.

Given that they seemingly don't, there's probably some other forces in play. Probably some combination of:

1. Maybe it's just really hard to evaluate a script early on. There's probably some truth to this, but I don't think much. Film execs read a lot of scripts and it's an easily trainable skill.

2. Maybe the script starts out good but gets screwed up because of perverse incentives. This is, I think, a bigger part of it. The director wants to put their mark on it. A big-name star wants their character to get more screen time. All of a sudden, there are forces pushing on the script that make it better for the people making the movie, but not for the view.

3. Corporate politics at the studio comes into play. A studio brings on a script doctor who is compelled to earn their check by making a certain amount of changes even if the script didn't need them. An exec owes someone a favor and gets a role jammed in for a particular actor. An exec got burned on a previous film about shark and says all sharks must be removed from all scripts.

4. Then the reality of production, scheduling and budget. You read a lot of stories about subplots that had to be cut because they ran out of money, scenes that were rushed because of location access, etc. I think a lot of times, the movie you watch is not the movie that was described on paper. It's not uncommon for screenwriters to take their name off a film because the final result of production hell isn't what they wrote.

While written in the early 80s, it’s thoroughly entertaining and very insightful as to how movies actually get made. His main point is that nobody knows anything. No one knows why one film was a hit and another wasn’t. So successful properies/stars/directors are milked for all they’re worth until suddenly they’re not.

Read the book, it’s great.

I mean, how many terrific Chewbacca interactions would have been missed out on if there hadn't been the on-set interplay between the actors? Either way, it proves that hairy beast characters are perfectly manageable with a big tall guy in a suit.

I don't know, I don't think the magnitudes match up here.

Game of Thrones is a cool show that people enjoy watching, which happens to be emblematic of the current trend of long-form, character-driven drama with a bug budget.

Star Wars was a more of a complete revolution.

This whole line of idiotic finger-pointing was kicked off because the movie business had the worst overall box office revenue in 20 years.

There are a few theater operators that have figured out that just showing the movie and selling expensive popcorn isn't good enough. They have to have comfortable seats, decent food, great drinks, rules against talking and using phones, and reserved seating. When the experience is good, I'll pay to see movies I already know well. For example, I just went to see the original Blade Runner two weekends ago.

It's a little like how I can watch baseball on TV, but every year I still love to go to the ballpark to watch live. There's more to it than just the thing you are ostensibly there to see.

So I agree with you. They should have same day streaming. For people that like going to the cinema, they will still go.

I also think that on your way out the theater, they should have DVDs and BluRays of the movie you just saw for sale.

You're right that they should make it easier to consume their content but they should also try making something watchable first.

But even a cursory look at recent Rotten Tomato ratings shows a tenuous relationship between the site’s ratings and actual box office. It has assigned a rotten rating to movies that have done well (The Hitmans’ Bodyguard, The Emoji Movie), and it affixes an overwhelmingly positive rating to a film that fared poorly (Logan Lucky).

With your example of Prometheus, no, the flick is not bad because of that scene, but the scene is an indication of the overall laziness of the plot. All the nit-picking, as you put it, is because there is nothing else to hold on to, which is not true of Alien at least (I don't particularly like Aliens).