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Oh wow, that's rich. Quoting from the article: Sites like Rotten Tomatoes that aggregate movie reviews into one overall rating are being blamed for poor openin

• sandworm101 11y ago
  The same arguments are made when "pre-release" copies appear online. The last thing the studios want is informed consumers. I say "pre-release" because more often than not the film has been released in one market but not another, for instance to set-top boxes in asia while it is still in theaters in north america. The games industry follows the same pattern. Reviewers with early access, actual early access, are routinely barred from saying anything publicly until the game is released. Publishers don't want knowledge of potentially game-breaking bugs getting out prior to purchase.
  • Retra 11y ago
    If only films could be pre-ordered!
• brianclements 11y ago
  Sometimes I get really excited when, in rare circumstances, the bottom line is suddenly tied directly to the quality of a product, and not just the roll-out from the sellers PR machine. Frankly, I didn't expect online reviews to have that much of an effect, but it feels so good to have the money do the talking in this case.
  • shalmanese 11y ago
    Before you get too excited, scroll through the Rotten Tomatoes Box Office Rankings: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/browse/box-office/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/browse/box-office/ for a few randomly selected weeks. There's not that clear a relationship between good reviews and box office as you would like.
    • riskneural 11y ago
      Rotten tomatoes represents the views of critics, which is one sort of view: was it good. Some viewers, like myself, may review more on a basis of: did I enjoy watching it. So, I wouldn't expect nor want a very strong correlation with a subset to the whole. To put it another way, I like good movies, but have an unreasonable fondness for zombie movies, and a fabulous hatred for Goodwill Hunting, PI, and the Big Bang Theory my perception of their failure to accurately represent my area (although Chuck is fine). If I were writing reviews, I'd have to cut back on my weird personal biases to make them marketable and useful.
• diminish 11y ago
  Indeed, since may, I try to check Rotten Tomatoes every week, and I end up choosing good movie openings recently. Previously subconsciously, I was basing my opening movie choice to actors/actresses playing, to the trailer or the poster. The last 3 Nicolas Cage movies I've seen, ended up being so bad that I started to check Rotten Tomatoes ratings which were in line with what I've experienced. So review sites are truly killing "cheating" studios' openings which relied on deceptive trailers, posters and "bad-performing" actors/actresses. [1] Nicolas Cage "overmonetizing his face" http://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/nicolas_cage/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/nicolas_cage/
  • ssharp 11y ago
    I've been using Rotten Tomatoes as my primary movie filter for a few years now. Although I don't see a lot of them, I can't think of any movie I've enjoyed all the much over that time that wasn't around or above 60%. There are some highly rated movies that I haven't enjoyed, but not the reverse.
• dspillett 11y ago
  This isn't the first time: Gigalo's poor performance at the box office was blamed on people texting their contacts as they left the theatre to say "go see something else instead". I can't remember if that was any form of public statement or an internal memo that leaked out, but either way it is funny.
  • bostik 11y ago
    This is not even a particularly new development. I remember reading a few articles back in 2010 or 2011 where movie studios were complaining that for some films, only the first viewing of the opening night would be sold out. They did some research and discovered that people were pushing social media and twitter updates as they were walking out, recommending everyone to just avoid the damn thing. This was at a time when cinemas would have tickets reserved and you could pick them up from the ticket booth. So what happened, was that people would simply not show up at all and the theatres couldn't even know that there were plenty of unsold tickets until ~1h before the start.
• laumars 11y ago
  I've seen a tendency for Hollywood to blame everyone bar themselves for a long long time. eg generic plot lines are blamed on the cost it takes to produce movies because movie goers demand the latest greatest special effects. Which isn't a complete lie, but then you have a movie like Skyline that manages to have excellent effects and at a fraction of budget of the big box office movies (though sadly Skyline was poor in a number of other areas). Hollywood also blames piracy, but they now have more ways to deliver their content than ever before, yet remain reluctant to really push their content over any new delivery channels. So you have to question how much of piracy is down to consumers being cheapskates, and how much is due to content holders not keeping up with consumer demand (please note that I'm not endorsing piracy). The problem with the movie industry is that they are so self absorbed that they think people owe them a decent living. But in reality they're a luxury. And these days a lot of people are cutting back on luxuries. So it's hardly surprising them consumers are voting with their wallets. It really is about time Hollywood woke up and realise that capitalism requires competition rather than whining and litigating whenever they feel their monopolies are threatened. </rant>
  • draugadrotten 11y ago
    > The problem with the movie industry is that they are so self absorbed that they think people owe them a decent living. But in reality they're a luxury. Another way to look at that, is that when I afford myself a luxury, I want to be treated well. Today, when I go to the cinema, I am treated like a potential criminal - I am spoonfed threats about being prosecuted for piracy if I take a photo of the cinema screen with my mobile phone camera and I am spoonfed 20-30 minutes of advertising before the movie I paid to see. None of that gives me a sense of "luxury", but rather a pretty seedy feeling of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. So the next Friday, I light a scented candle, pour a cognac, put some brillat savarin on the table and turn on Netflix's latest series. Now, that's luxury.
    • rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
      Wow. Bingo. Now that you mention it, the last time I enjoyed myself in a theater was when I saw Gravity at one of those IMAX places with absurdly large reclining chairs. Before that it was sneaking a last call order of Chinese mall court takeout with my friends in high school into the theater on a quiet Sunday evening when nobody was around or bothered to check our backpacks. We sat in the back and enjoyed the film and our food that cost half and filled us twice what we'd pay for at the concessions stand. Theaters suck now. The real mystery of plummeting profits is how thick in denial theater owners are.
• eevilspock 11y ago
  > When a bunch of reviews can undo the effects of a massive, weeks or months long marketing push, I'd say it's time to rethink your product strategy. Whenever a debate about advertising pops up on HN, many people defend it as the necessary way for consumers to find out about good products. Healthy free markets depend on informed consumers, but to think that advertising results in informed consumers makes little sense. I find it strange that a community of logic and science oriented people can hold such a notion. When communities were small, reputation was king. If your town had two bakers, everyone knew which one was good and which one sucked. No amount of advertising would fool the townsfolk into going to the sucky one. But this doesn't scale to huge cities with tens, hundreds or thousands of choices. We can't know the reputation of such a wide array, and we can easily be fooled by advertising. Internet-based recommendation systems make the grapevine and reputation scalable. I hope we see more innovation. Yelp is a start, but it fails miserably because if I rate a place 5 because I love very authentic Thai food, and another person rates it a 1 because they are used to Americanized Thai, the restaurant gets a 3 (I'm simplifying for illustrative purposes). In other words, Yelp's rating is useless to both me and the other person. I'm hoping for a future where recommendation systems and collaborative filtering get so good that they render marketing and advertising useless.
  • thenomad 11y ago
    That'd be nice, but it hasn't happened yet. I'm not going to make a grand sweeping statement here, but certainly, I've found out about multiple useful products via adverts. I actively don't want them to go away completely. I am very interested in hearing about new products in a number of spaces. If people can pay to let me know, briefly, about their thing that they think I might find useful, I'm cool with that.
    • Majestic121 11y ago
      Did you actually have a need for those products before hearing about them? I find myself very often in the situation were I hear/learn about a new cool thing, and I want it absolutely right now (The last example was a colleague bringing an Oculus to work, I almost ordered one the spot) However, I try to wait a bit before actually buying anything big (like one/two weeks), and I find that most of the time I don't actually need/care about the product I was so hyped about. This is one of the part that annoy me the most about advertising, especially if it is well targeted : It creates a new need and offers (sells) its solution, more than it helps me to fulfill a real need.
• Udik 11y ago
  The problem with Rotten Tomatoes is that - I suspect- the studios are perfectly able to influence the professional reviewers. Or, more probably, professional reviewers adjust their expectations and judgments on the type of movie they're reviewing. The end result is that every recent shiny pile-of-crap produced by Hollywood gets enthusiastic reviews and therefore excellent scores on RT. Gravity: RT score 97% 2001 A Space Odissey: RT score 96% The Martian: RT score 93% Blade Runner: RT score 89% If you're looking for an alternative, I use http://www.criticker.com http://www.criticker.com. It calculates expected movie ratings based on your previous ratings, it's a much better way to decide what's worth seeing and what is not.
  • ciaranm 11y ago
    I thought the Martian was excellent. You'll notice that the user-rated % is higher than the critics, at 94%. From the video game aggregation space, you tend to see the type of thing you're suggesting (games that are big-budget-questionably-reviewed) have _much_ lower user-scores than critics. I would be surprised if user-rated movies was different.
    • Udik 11y ago
      De gustibus non est disputandum. At least, not on HN. However, would you put The Martian almost on par with 2001? Would you rate it more than Blade Runner? I wouldn't do either, no way. As for the video games space, well, I don't know it enough. But I suppose you could argue that video games are different from movies in that they require a much higher level of engagement, both in terms of time and concentration - not to mention the monetary investment. So it is reasonable that they are evaluated more thoroughly by their users and that whatever hype surrounds them has a lower impact of their final rating.
      • octo_t 11y ago
        To be honest, I preferred the martian to 2001. Might have just been the mindset that I watched 2001 in, but it felt the like 3 or 4 films in one and sort of dragged. Although I would rate Blade Runner higher than the martian. Your mileage may vary, one size does not fit all etc etc.
• rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Hollywood has known what to do when they're selling shit for years: crank up the marketing to get as many people buying tickets as possible before word gets out that the film sucks. As a result the costs of films go way up to the degree that we're pretty much stuck with Oscar bait tragic dramas or the same lukewarm franchises we've had shoved down our throats before we were old enough to chew.
  • philh 11y ago
    Hollywood wants to make films that people want to watch. They might be able to trick people into going to the cinema before the reviews come out, if necessary. But that won't save it in home entertainment, which is where most of the money is. They're pretty good at it, too. This year, Furious 7 and Jurassic World have been two of the top-grossing films ever. That's not because people were tricked into seeing them, and didn't know what they were in for. It's because people enjoyed watching those films.
• pasbesoin 11y ago
  So, the next trade deal after TPP will outlaw reviews, or "examining the internal functioning of entertainment products." Sounds like a poor joke. With increasing efforts to e.g. DMCA excerpts, citations, and other forms of "fair use" -- not to mention the TPP et al. already apparently attempting to constrain and wipe out "fair use", I'm not sure it really is.