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Comment by jackero | Hacker News Reader

I find RT scores very accurate but not the raw score.

What I mean is that a 70% score is meaningless to me. I need to know the movie genre, the audience score, the age of the movie and then I basically do a “lookup table” in my head. And I have that lookup table because I’ve looked up every movie I’ve watched on RT for 15 years so I know how the scores correlate to my own personal opinions.

As an example: the author said that critic scores should align with audience scores but no that’s not true at all. Critics tend to care more about plot continuity, plot depth and details while the audience tends to care about enjoyability. Both are important to me so I always look at both scores. That’s why a lot of very funny comedies have a 60-69% critic score but a 90%-100% audience score — because it’s hilarious but the plot makes no fucking sense and has a million holes. And if you see a comedy with 95% critic but 70% audience, it will be thought-provoking and well done but don’t expect more than occasional chuckles.

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Plex shows you both critic and audience scores from RT (IMDB also) and they indeed diverge consistently on the lines you suggest. In general I trust the audience scores a lot more because I'm trying to have fun watching movies rather than analyze their plot/pacing/cinematography/etc.

The audience can be trusted to know how to have fun. The discrepancy between critic and audience scores is also a valuable signal to judge how fun campy/schlocky/B-movie horror films particularly from the 80s and 90s.

Rotten Tomatoes becomes way more useful once you treat it as a tool rather than a verdict

In Rotten Tomatoes there's always That Guy who's being contrary for the sake of being different.

Like Paddington and Paddington 2 had 100% review scores for a long time, until some "reviewers" disliked it on purpose bringing Paddington 2 to 99%

Using multiple sites as an aggregate works. In IMDB you need to check the vote distribution graph and in your mind take out all the 1's and 10's and see where the average/median lies after that.

And it's important to find actual reviewers whose taste aligns with yours and use them as more directed guidance.

>Paddington 2

After Chat recommended this as "on par with Shawshank," I watched this last week.

What did I just watch? Why would I recommend this movie to anybody?

It’s a happy movie. No grimdark no blood or guns, low stakes and just pure joy.

>It's a happy movie ... just pure joy.

That's fair. I am an insufferable person, so it checks out.

same is true for product reviews in online shops

I often enjoy movies that are unexpected and don't fit neatly into one established genre, but I think these tend to get lower audience ratings, while films that deliver to expectations do better, even if most of a randomly selected audience would dislike them. If a movie is a comedy, with a poster with big red letters and a white background, people know it's a certain kind of movie, and mostly those who enjoy those movies will go see it. Likewise with documentaries about some niche interest - those who watch it mostly sought it out because they're into that.

Same. I’m big into filmmaking and arthouse films. But other times I may just want something simple.

Using RT’s two-axis score distribution helps narrow down movies.

My immediate thought after seeing the first chart was that it is inversely related to my own experience with movies in the last 20 years. Maybe there's an idea in there for a 'score normalizing' browser extension.

Always wondered why Rings of Power have 84% critics score but just 49% audience.

One important factor is that the critics score is binary in a sense: if all critics agree that the movie was "passable but not great" then Rotten Tomatoes still gives it a 100% critics score.

The website explains it clearly enough I would say.

Because critics get paid, whilst audience have to pay.

I didn't like the idea that my money had paid for such a disservice of my favourite book, so it pushed me to cancel my Prime subscription that had been ongoing for years. I don't buy nearly as much on Amazon these days as a consequence.

I am annoyed by Rings of Power, but at least we got some fairly passable (if still very flawed) adaptations from Peter Jackson. I'm more salty about Wheel of Time, because that trashed the source material just as hard, and because it bombed it's unlikely we will ever see someone try again with an actual good adaptation.

I rarely get angry about bad content but RoP felt like a personal affront. I love Tolkien's world and the people who put RoP together did so with not just ignorance and incompetence, but some kind of malice. They intentionally butchered Tolkien's writing and world. This stands in such stark contrast with Peter Jackson's position that it is not his right to inject his personal values and narcissistic hubris into the movies. He chose to honour the material as best he could while adapting it. It is, without any shadow of a doubt, the better approach.

> but some kind of malice

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence :)

I bet the RoP team are great content creation professionals. They obey all the rules of their craft.

They also do not care about the material at all, otherwise they'd be script writers and directors, not content creators.

> This stands in such stark contrast with Peter Jackson's position that it is not his right to inject his personal values and narcissistic hubris into the movies. He chose to honour the material as best he could while adapting it.

That's funny, because that's very much not what happened with those movies. Remember the character assassination of Faramir? I recall Jackson (or perhaps Fran Walsh) saying in an interview that they deliberately broke from Tolkien's story with that one, because the way Tolkien wrote it didn't fit the story they were trying to tell. They felt that having someone set the One Ring aside when tempted undermined the idea of building up the Ring as a threat in the minds of the audience. In other words, they chose to go with the story they wanted to tell rather than honoring the story Tolkien told.

Certainly the LOTR movies weren't as flagrant as Rings of Power with the liberties they took. And some of the changes were indeed due to the constraints of adapting to the medium of film, rather than a book. But even so, they chose to disrespect the source material pretty blatantly at times.

It's fair to point out the difference re Faramir but I feel it is rather small and inconsequential. He ultimately made the same decision in both the book and movie. Again, I am not contending that no changes were made. A movie adaptation requires changes. I'm claiming that the changes were in service to the material, lore, world-buildings, themes, and messaging. The RoP writers thumbed their noses at all of that.

To me that feels like sacrificing a detail to service the larger story, which when you're trying to fit three whole books into just three movies might be necessary. In RoP they made many changes nilly-willy, missing most of what made the source material great.

> Report says PR firm has been paying Rotten Tomatoes critics for positive reviews (screengeek.net) 254 points by mc32 on Sept 7, 2023

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37419427

Critics often score based on first few episodes to be released in, and never revisit the score. And if it's shiny/ expensive (and RoP was both) and seems like it might lead somewhere, they risk ridiculing themselves by being too critical.

Critics have a political agenda, they overrate movies with “a message”, the message being always leaning Californian. The movie industry is a massive sector with lobbies, and paid critics are no stranger to that.

And as the sibling says, audience pays to see a movie. The audience, the people, are more politically balanced. There is no bias or selection: It’s the democratic components, including people that the “in” lobbies don’t like.

If only we could get rid of this damn audience!

Your OP just gave examples of bias.

Obviously individuals still have preferences and biases. The idea is that they are less aligned than critics, so they average each other out somewhat.

The claim was "There is no bias or selection".

And there's no evidence for "the idea". Also the "audience" reviewers are self-selecting, and in my experience tilt towards shallowness and bigotry. My own preferences are generally better aligned with the top critics.

If I weren't already well familiar with the diverse critic reviews on RT, claims that the critics are "woke" (or equivalently, have a "Californian" "political agenda" that "overrates" movies with a message) would be reason for me to value their views over self-selecting "audience" reviews, which I find to be mostly shallow and uninformed, and with a good dose of provincial bigotry as part of the "political balance". I personally am not looking for "political balance", certainly not as that currently manifests itself in the U.S.

And if paid critics are no stranger to lobbies (or the movie industry as a massive sector with lobbies ... it's a bit hard to parse), I see no particular reason to expect them to have a political agenda that overrates movies with a message--I don't think those are the ones that make big bucks for the massive sector. (I'm more interested in indie fare, or at least stuff with more character and depth and less CGI and juvenile superheroes vs. supervillains.) Much more likely is that this spew reflects a political agenda.

I thought "Californian bias" was a great term precisely because it isn't quite the same (or as shallow) as "woke". How could the movie industry not have a Californian bias? So much of it is made in that very peculiar culture, peculiar even by American standards.

And yet if you hated that sort of thing, why (or how?) would you become a movie critic? Can you imagine being a classical music critic and intensely disliking Vienna? (Another damn peculiar, damn influential culture, by the way).

I agree. It is clear and self-evident that movie critics have a California bias. I cite Emilia Perez (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/emilia_perez) with a 71% of critics recommending the movie. This movie won *91 awards* this season. This is, by any objective and subjective metric, an atrocious film. Audiences gave it 17% on Rotten and 5.4 on IMDB. Why did this movie win so many awards and positive reviews from critics? Because it has a trans person as the lead. That's it. The bias is on full display with this movie.

But that is more about "woke" than California. My point was that California is peculiar in far more complicated ways than merely being more trans-positive. Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't seem especially "woke" to me, but he seems very California. Scientology is hardly "woke", but it's very California. Steve Jobs, same. Utterly weird culture, if we hadn't been so extremely exposed to it. We think of so many things as normal, even though they're not normal at all in our actual lives where we are, but they're normal in California. (Well, more normal). That was Vienna too. It goes way beyond a simple culture war dichotomy.

I completely agree. Feels a bit ironic that not only do anti-woke conservatives seem to implicitly believe California = woke, but this unnuanced read is apparently held a plurality of liberals as well.

A California bias is not the same as being woke. 6 time Oscar award winner and 14 time Oscar Nominee film La La Land wasn't especially woke, but it was damn near manufactured in a lab to appeal to the exact sort of sensibilities that are held by Academy members.

The focus on careerism and social climbing, the nostalgia for an era of media since gone by, the melancholic reality of how damn near impossible it is to succeed as an actor or musician, these aren't woke ideas, but they do reflect the general sentimentality of the people in the greater LA area.

Something I thought you might get into would be series, whether movies or TV / sequels. Sometimes they get devoted fans who love the whole series, and those sequels or later season have great scores, but you might not enjoy them whatsoever.

My example would be a TV show, A Discovery of Witches which is overall well-received, but I couldn't enjoy at all. Perhaps if you read the books, you'll like the show, but for me, it was such an empty show, devoid of excitement or intrigue or entertainment value.

Additionally there are movies who just have something unique to them that a niche audience may love, but both critics and the general audience treat them more harshly.

The truth is that other peoples opinion may or may not be a good proxy for your own taste in movies, even if it was uncorrupted and independent.

Too bad the two ratings categories are "critic" and "audience" instead of "plot", "humor", "characters", "suspense", ...

What I find weird is that no one has solved the "people like you also liked this" problem for ratings/reviews.

All ratings on these platforms are average values through the entire cross-section of people.

Yet I am sure that they are people who have a very similar taste like me. I want to read their reviews, see their ratings, and recommendations.

Social media platforms do that pretty well these days.

I guess because such a tool starts with you having to input a ton of data before being useful. Either people don't do that or if they are willing then the platform would be getting lots of valuable data and wants to keep you feeding it to increase their trove of data before selling off to Amazon or Google.

I already rated hundreds of movies and TV shows on IMDB, for example. This could be used as a basis.

https://www.criticker.com is the best I’ve seen for this. You rate movies relatively and then they match your ratings to people who have similar tastes and recommend based on that. So if you have period westerns all rated highly they’ll see what other movies were rated highly by people so rare period westerns highly. It’s actually pretty genius.

A recommendations Netflix guy explained this quite well, people lie in their reviews, so they mostly don't matter, what matters is watching habits, those clearly show what you really like instead of the imaginary person that rates movies they'd never watch.

So the actual market for something that recommends like that is quite small.

I would disagree and say this is important if you are trying to maximize screen time, not if you are trying to maximize enjoyment. When I want to half pay attention or I am mentally tired, I put on something easy, usually something I have seen before. I watch it because it is easy and familiar, but I have no desire to watch something “similar”. If you keep pushing it, and auto playing, you could probably get me to watch similar things, but I doubt I will like them.

When I’m actually watching something, I want it to be complex, thoughtful, interesting and challenging. I don’t spend as much time watching but those are the things I watch with all of my attention.

I am actively trying to reduce my intake of low effort tv because it wastes my time, doesn’t actually give me much enjoyment, and takes attention away from things I do enjoy. It’s like comparing the books you read to doomscrolling Facebook. Reading time vs ratings are going to be very different.

Interesting.

Did you see that online somewhere?

Don't remember where the specific interview was but here's them saying why they killed the star rating: https://about.netflix.com/en/news/goodbye-stars-hello-thumbs

http://www.gnovies.com exists since 2002.

(Other media: http://www.gnod.com)

If you use Letterboxd, https://letterboxd.samlearner.com/ is good for this purpose.

Rateyourmusic.com / Sonemic added movie scores/reviews a long time ago. You can follow people and their scores will be visible for you.

They kind of have, that's how Netflix and Spotify recommended for you stuff works

There is Tastedive, which has given both great suggestions as well as recommended utter garbage to me in the past. Very hit or miss, but when it hits it hits.

Please list a few more insights like this for picking good movies, thanks!

Additionally, I think someone could build an interesting RT browser based on these kinds of insights.

Here is a long ass post with some more but they come with a huge disclaimer — they are VERY personal opinions:

If you care a lot about plot and hate holes, go for critic >70%. 60-69% is passable but only if you like the subject/genre of the movie.

Very personal opinion — I find any movie with critic <50% completely unwatchable. I literally want to walk out of the theater. This includes nearly every modern horror movie because characters in horror movies always do dumb things. I know that’s the appeal but I hate it.

The extremely rare horror movie with >85% critic probably won’t be scary but these are personally the only horrors I enjoy (e.g. The Cabin in the Woods).

Movies with audience scores below 60% are hard watches.

>90% critic movies are really well done as in they did their homework. Left no stone unturned. It doesn’t mean that it’s an objectively good or memorable movie (use IMDB scores for that).

If you like experimental movies and/or are you’re into filmmaking, go for >90% critic and 65-85% audience for gems. If you’re not, you will HATE these movies.

But watch out — sometimes if you come an across a movie with high critic and low audience, it’s a movie really for people in the movie industry. You have to read the synopsis to figure out which case it is. See Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Superhero movies and fandom movies (e.g. LOTR) need extra consideration. If they didn’t follow source material, audience scores seem to be even lower than if it was original content. On the other hand, it also goes the other way.

If you’re a deep cut kind of person, check to make sure that the movie has a high enough rating count. Scores for less well-known movies are less accurate.

Old movies, especially those older than the 70s-80s, are harder to judge on RT. There seems to be a self-selection bias of people who are only rating those movies because they remembered liking them. But at the same time, they were also more revolutionary for their time (to be fair to the movie).

All of these tips are for movies. I watch few TV shows and don’t have insight into that side of RT.

>If you like experimental movies and/or are you’re into filmmaking, go for >90% critic and 65-85% audience for gems. If you’re not, you will HATE these movies.

Just checked some random “weird arthouse” movies I liked, mostly horror genre. It holds up pretty well. And I wouldn't in a million years recommend these movies to anyone that I didn't already know liked "these types" of movies.

The Blackcoat's Daughter: Critic 77%, Audience 52%

Possessor: Critic 94%, Audience 59%

The Lighthouse: Critic 90%, Audience 72%

The Killing of a Sacred Deer: Critic 79%, Audience 63%

A Ghost Story: Critic 91%, Audience 67%

Midsommar: Critic 83%, Audience 63%

The last comedy that I saw that matches your description is American Fiction. It didn’t feature too many laugh out loud moments, but it was thought provoking and well done. And yet, 93% from critics and 95% from audiences.

I wonder if audiences can appreciate these movies more than you give them credit for?

Let’s try a few more

- Death of Stalin (94%, 79%) has the pattern you’ve predicted.

- O Brother Where Art Thou? (78%, 89%) has the opposite of the pattern.

- Grand Budapest Hotel (92%, 87%) was appreciated by both, like American Fiction.

I’m just not seeing a pattern here. Looking at comedies that fit your description the critics and audience scores don’t follow a predictable 95%, 70% pattern.

A few things:

- Ratings are very personal. I find some movies funny but others don’t.

- There’s more factors involved but there’s no point mentioning them because the movies I like are not the movies you might like. Everyone has to find their own multi-dimension multi-axis criteria.

- And lastly, to repeat what someone else said — I see RT scores as a tool, not a verdict. It just has to be accurate enough where I consistently can pick movies I will enjoy.

Death of Stalin is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. It's been a long time since I laughed so hard at a movie or TV show.

And I laughed my ass off watching American Fiction. These are funny movies! Just a different vibe from say Talladega Nights.

The classification of "comedy" seems to be a bit ambiguous.

Funny People with Adam Sandler is considered a comedy, and has a trailer to match. But the actual content of the movie is that of a drama / tragedy. (69% critics, 48% audience.)

The Bear (TV show) is called a comedy but everything I've read paints it as... drama.

American Fiction, for me, was a thoughtful drama with dark humor. And I think that's what the audience expected so the scores match. I never thought it was a comedy.

Maybe this is a me problem where I don't consider things comedy when others do.

I mean, Wes Anderson movies aren't exactly comedy either. They are whimsical and silly, and can elicit laughter, but the stories are dramatic.

I generally find IMDB user scores far more reliable and granular for movies. There is a noticeable jump in a movie's quality when it gets a 6.x rating (okay), versus a 7.x (great) versus an 8.x (a Top 500 of all time).

Metacritic is the next most useful, while Rotten Tomatoes is easily the least useful. High critical and user RT reviews often does not provide a good intensity barometer of how good the film actually is. The last ten years I went from being a loyal RT user to completely ignoring their scores altogether.

You basically want a cross sectionally standardised score

High critic score / high audience score = Good

High critic score / low audience score = Paid-for hype, or politically motivated reviews

Low critic score / high audience score = Possibly a good movie

Low critic score / low audience score = Bad

I have to disagree with your take on "High critic score / low audience score". There is a swathe of more challenging, experimental, or art house movies that fall into this category. These reviews fill the void where another audience only place like imdb falls short.

Low critic score / high audience score = Bad, but enjoyable for the masses

Maybe we need to define "bad," because I would argue an enjoyable movie is good. Movies don't need to be avant garde to be good. They just need to be entertaining.

I wish this were true, but the critics as a polity just don't have a sophisticated palate. Many individual critics much like many general audience members do, I'm sure.

This sounds appealingly highbrow, but it's not particularly accurate in my experience. I think the critics often get into their own bizarre headspace that nobody else cares about.

this feels like an interview question

Here is a better heuristic:

High critic score / low audience score = Avant garde type films. Might go over your head

Low critic score / high audience score = Maybe fun but forgettable movie

I feel pretty confident that Captain Marvel, Emilia Perez, Spy Kids, Sausage Party, The Last Jedi, and Ghostbusters 2016 aren't at much risk of going over the heads of audiences, but you're entitled to your opinion if you think they count as avant garde cinema

Hey it's a heuristic so ymmv

"politically motivated reviews"

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