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

• tweakz 9y ago
  I thought it was piracy? Damn, clearly I have to pivot to hating Rotten Tomatoes.
• overcast 9y ago
  Thing is, the ratings are irrelevant. Someone is paying to see these movies, else executives wouldn't approving them to be made. It's all about money, and brainless, rehashed, sequel nonsense makes tons of it. You want someone to blame? Blame the public. It's not Rotten Tomatoes or the Movie Industry. The latter is giving everyone exactly what they want. In response to below. The Mummy made $403,814,493 with a 16% !! Poor turnouts at the theater are due entirely to home streaming services. People don't want to leave their houses to go sit with a bunch of strangers anymore. It doesn't have anything to do with garbage movies. There has always been tons of crap in the theaters.
  • aetherson 9y ago
    Did you read the article? This whole line of idiotic finger-pointing was kicked off because the movie business had the worst overall box office revenue in 20 years.
  • cgore 9y ago
    But they aren't that's the point, this is some of the worst turnouts for movies ever.
  • watwut 9y ago
    I would go to see movie, if there would movie that I would be interested to see. Crickets,nothing, just sameness I have already seen hundreds times or comics/star wars or other old franchise I never cared about.
    • mavhc 9y ago
      There's lots of good movies out, are they not showing anywhere near you?
      • watwut 9y ago
        Examples?
        • macintux 9y ago
          Logan Lucky looked really good, vanished from theaters before I could see it. Baby Driver was very good. Dunkirk. And those are just the big productions.
          • watwut 9y ago
            I have seen baby driver, it was ok except large plot holes (especially around his girlfriend and boss behavior which made little sense to me by the end of movie). Dunkirk does not seem my thing, but I will check Logan, thanks.
            • ashark 9y ago
              The last few years have been a kind of mini-golden-age for low- to mid-budget horror, if that's your thing, and especially if you like your horror a little off-kilter. It Follows, The Babadook, The Conjuring (kind of a low-key superhero movie blended with very not-scary horror, in many ways, but well acted, plotted, paced, and put together), Train to Busan, You're Next, The Void. The new Evil Dead. Some others I'm sure I'm forgetting right now. I've heard Girl with all the Gifts and Get Out are excellent, but haven't seen them yet. There are serious stinkers to avoid (It, Insidious series, many others) of course, so it's a bit of a minefield, but worth the effort if you enjoy that kind of thing.
              • watwut 9y ago
                Thanks! Bookmarking this, this sounds like it might be my thing.
  • Touche 9y ago
    I thought The Mummy was pretty good. I mean, it didn't change my life, but as an action/adventure type I liked it as much as the typical superhero or whatever movie.
• cgore 9y ago
  I think more than anything what we need is more movies made by low-budget places. I really don't want to see another sequel, redo, or comic book movie. It's just lazy on the part of the movie companies.
  • snarf21 9y ago
    This is also because Amazon and Netflix are buying up things that might have otherwise gone to the theaters. Why pay royalties forever when you can just own it forever and amortize the cost?
    • thadjo 9y ago
      true, but i think these purchases have a much greater impact on TV that film. Amazon, Netflix, Hulu all have a long list of really successful TV shows but it's hard to think of a 120-minute movie that has risen to the ranks of Handmaiden's Tale, House of Cards, etc..
      • snarf21 9y ago
        True, it is affecting both. I was speaking also to the fact that Manchester by the Sea (e.g.) was made by Amazon. A great outcome for them is simply to break even at the theater. They then have an exclusive movie for free forever. The studios can't afford for all of their movies to break even.
  • yahna 9y ago
    > I really don't want to see another sequel, redo, or comic book movie. Well millions and millions of other people do, so why should the movie companies cater to you instead?
    • watwut 9y ago
      Because it is super cool if they make a movie or game you like for a change too.
    • fusiongyro 9y ago
• jdlyga 9y ago
  If a movie is over 2 and a half hours long, and doesn't bring anything new to the table, then I'm not interested.
• AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
  We're due for another studio crash. Hopefully that will scale back some of the ridiculous budgets on these things and let some new blood break into the scene.
  • irrational 9y ago
    Wouldn't that make them even more risk adverse?
    • MBCook 9y ago
      If they make fewer $200m movies and experiment more with $10m movies... would that be bad? They are risk averse right now but they’re doing it by putting all their eggs in one or two baskets.
• anton_tarasenko 9y ago
  I once plotted the TSPDT Top 1000 movies by year. That's an all-time ranking voted by critics. The distribution plot peaks around the 1970s and declines since then. For one, post-war European cinema was really great and influenced the American industry. Now all major movies originate in the same place. The last fresh blood had come mostly from Latin America, Mexico in particular. And the place for experiments changed. Now it's TV series. If the concept works, they make another season. Two-hour feature films are reserved for proven concepts. For moviegoers, it turns to be more like a social experience, not an arty one.
  • yahna 9y ago
    Do they limit it only to contemporary impressions of the films, or do they let the idea that something is a "classic" cloud it?
    • jmcgough 9y ago
      It's an aggregate of lists created by critics, so there's certainly bias towards older films.
  • beat 9y ago
    The movie industry has eras, marked by certain production styles. In Hollywood at least, the 1970s was the era of the auteur director. A wave of directors (and actors) who had apprenticed under the famed B-movie master Roger Corman came to power on the strength of a series of absolute masterpieces. It started with Easy Rider, which was shot on a very low budget, and received massive box office success and critical acclaim. It ended with Heaven's Gate, an outrageously expensive disaster that has never even been properly released (I've seen one of the medium-length edits of it, and yes, it stinks). 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?
• kylehotchkiss 9y ago
  Well, looks like there is a price trying to save cash by trying to make a sequel to everything (so you don't have to re-create characters, some sets, audiences...)
• Animats 9y ago
  The movie industry doesn't seem to be able to figure out if a movie will be a dud up front. Most of the dud movies are broken at the script and actor selection phase. Maybe productions need to do a staged reading in front of an audience as a test before going into production. Perhaps with slides and sketches from the storyboard for the action. The CG people have their act together. When was the last time a big-budget movie flopped because the special effects were done badly? Effects are carrying many weak movies. People don't realize until it's over that it sucked.
  • ghaff 9y ago
    Movie development is already a hugely involved drawn-out process. Arguably it's already too focused on what the audience wants. 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 :-)
  • runevault 9y ago
    Something to keep in mind, a lot of movies when bought are good, but then people come in and muck with the script (either producers/execs tell the original screenwriter to make these changes, or they hire someone else to do it). 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.
  • munificent 9y ago
    > Most of the dud movies are broken at the script and actor selection phase. 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.
• mavhc 9y ago
  I don't even go to RT now that Google puts a critic rating from there or elsewhere up when I Google a title. See what's airing, google them all, if they get high marks read what they're about, if there's 3 or more films that are good and I want to see, go and see them in a day
• beat 9y ago
  A flip side to this... is Rotten Tomatoes boosting movies that would otherwise be ignored, by virtue of excellent ratings? I'm thinking specifically of Hidden Figures here. Who would ever have thought that we'd see a Star Wars movie (Rogue One) booted out of the #1 spot by a movie about black women doing math? (This is in no way a criticism of either movie, btw. I loved both of them and consider them high-water marks of recent cinema.)
  • mtgx 9y ago
    I don't see the problem with that. Rotten Tomatoes is a review site where people judge the quality of a movie, not the popularity of a movie. You're probably thinking of popularity when you say that, because to me, Rogue One was kind of "meh", but that's just my opinion.
    • beat 9y ago
      What I'm saying is that movies that would otherwise be ignored might be achieving surprise popularity due to strong reviews on Rotten Tomatoes - Hidden Figures as a case in point. It was the #1 movie in America, not some obscure art film, which is the fate I would expect for such a subject, told in such a way. I think popularity followed from quality. Of course, any ol' movie labeled Star Wars will do well, by virtue of brand.
  • frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    I could totally believe that. A studio like A24 might not be financially viable if they weren't able to put out a few highly rated movies every year.
  • irrational 9y ago
    Maybe. I only go see movies in the theater if the Rotten Tomatoes score is 90+ (otherwise I just wait for redbox). That is the reason why I went to see Hidden Figures. If it had been sub-90 I wouldn't have seen it in the theater and, frankly, by the time it got to Redbox I probably would have passed it right over (which would have been a shame since it was a great movie).
  • 9y ago
• noncoml 9y ago
  I don't know what the complaints are about. I have observed that RT has constantly over-inflated rating for movies while they are still playing in the theaters.
  • fishywang 9y ago
    Are you confused RT with IMDb by any chance? IMDb do have inflated rating for new-ish movies, but I don't think RT has the same issue (if you are looking at critic rating a.k.a. freshness, not the user rating)
    • noncoml 9y ago
      No, RT. For example look at "Wind River". Rating is at 86% By comparison, some older movies around or lower than that rating: "The Big Lebowski": 81% "Gladiator": 76% "The Wolf of Wall Streer": 77%
      • fishywang 9y ago
        Do you have a better example? Because there's no guarantee that The Big Lebowski or Gladiator or The Wolf of Wall Street should be better than Wind River.
        • noncoml 9y ago
          Well, you are right, even if some movie that I or you like more scores lower than another doesn't mean anything. My original claim was movie rating changes dramatically during the lifetime of the movie, i.e. while in theaters and after, which I don't have any data to prove is, so if I am allowed I would like to retract the original claim.
• drblast 9y ago
  I often wonder if movies will simply occupy a niche market in the future. I wonder that about a lot of industries. Appealing to huge demographics with excellent movies would certainly be more profitable, but what if the current status quo of rehashing comic books over and over again is profitable enough? That's certainly a safer bet. Monster truck rallies cater to a small subset of society, and they're probably not going anywhere. Nobody wonders why the monster truck rally industry doesn't try to expand its audience; they do what they do and it's profitable enough to keep them going. Why change what works? Capitalism is like evolution. You don't have to be excellent to survive, you just have to be good enough not to die.
  • gizmo686 9y ago
    I suspect that the division between "movies" and "television" will start to dissapear. As television continues to shift from TV to online video on demand, it will face less and less pressure to divide itself into 22 or 44 minute episodes. Further, the notion of paying for add free shows online appears to be tenable. We are also seeing Netflix release entire seasons at once.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• SadWebDeveloper 9y ago
  The day the movie industry allows me to legally stream a "just released movie" straight to my 4k tv (or my phone), that day, they will have the same or more revenue as before. Until that happen, i would definitely check the ratings/reviews before spending solid amount of money and time on "going" to the cinema.
  • criddell 9y ago
    I have a nice television, but I still prefer going to a good theater to see movies. 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.
    • mulmen 9y ago
      Power lanes? It will never work! The best time to sell someone a product is months after their initial exposure when they have forgotten completely about it. /s
  • mulmen 9y ago
    I'm not sure I would do the same. Going to the theater isn't such a limitation for me. My holdup is that movies are very rarely good. Even if they were free to my TV I wouldn't watch a lot of blockbusters. You're right that they should make it easier to consume their content but they should also try making something watchable first.
  • Aunche 9y ago
    The movie industry never want that. If you go to a movie theater with your friends, everyone has to buy their own ticket. However, if you can share a movie, a lot of people can split the cost of a single viewing.
• PopsiclePete 9y ago
  Movies lately: * Generic Super-Hero Movie A. * Generic Super-Hero Movie B. Different title from A, yet actually identical plot and sometimes actors. * A new CG cartoon "for the whole family". They haven't had an original idea since Wall-E. * Generic block-buster action movie with robots and/or ninjas or ninja-robots, explosions, Chevrolet placement ads, and at least 2 pairs of extremely shapely female breasts. * Generic ultra-patriotic military-hero-worship action flick where rugged, muscly bearded Alpha-Macho super-bros kill brown people, usually has the word "American" in the title, and a scene-that-lasts-too-long where Rick tearfully tells Sam to tell his wife he loves her as his guts slowly (all too slowly) fall out of his torn-up torso. * Generic coming-of-age and beating-all-odds story about a lovable but bullied lonely/introverted/gay/black/Muslim kid from the streets/ghetto/Pakistan who overcomes all odds to be his neighborhood's/high-school's/country's star juggler/drummer/dancer/stripper/singer/refugee-turned-Nobel-laureate and gets the girl/boy at the end. * A documentary telling me I'm fat, living in a banana republic Orwellian surveillance police-state dystopia with horrible health-care and a deteriorating environment. * Girl-Squad/Bro-team Buddy Comedy with a bunch of 45-year-olds acting like rich, spoiled, immature 18-year-olds at friend X's wedding. Hilarity ensues. Basically, I'm either being bored out of my mind for the whole duration, or sad/frustrated that this world is so horrible/unjust, or watching a 120-minute commercial for Pepsi/Chevrolet/Sex, or being actively recruited for the Marines. TV is much better, with lots more variety.
  • criddell 9y ago
    > TV is much better, with lots more variety 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.
    • MBCook 9y ago
      Yeah, it’s flipped. Part of that is more control when working for TV, part of it is the ability to tell a story in more than 120m. Let’s you explore much deeper things or have way more character development.
• slg 9y ago
  These type of articles never explore the potential results of the Rotten Tomatoes voting system. As the article mentions the RT rating is not a measure of how good a movie is, it is a measure of the percentage of people who viewed the movie positively. A 100% doesn't mean a movie is perfect or even particularly good, it means no one thought it was bad. A movie designed to do well on a RT score needs to please everyone. The end result is something that tries to be bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive. As an avid movie goer, that is a horrible result. I would much rather see a movie that takes risks and fails than something with little ambition outside turning a profit. If you ask people why they don't go to the movies more they will often cite the idea that there is nothing new they haven't seen before (besides the complaints you hear about prices). That is another way of phrasing this exact problem. It is becoming more and more risky to innovate and try something new. You end up with lots of sequels, remakes, and other cookie cutter projects. 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.
  • Touche 9y ago
    Those films are now done by Netflix and Amazon. Just a different model. I used to go to an indie theater twice a week when I was in college and saw every niche film. But those theaters hardly exist any more. The big theater experience just isn't cut out for that. It's barely pleasant enough to go see the latest popcorn movie. The industry really needs to take at-home seriously.
    • nebabyte 9y ago
      "The industry" only cares about its own moneymaking; you're not gonna see them roll over and say "hey, you know what's a really good movie?" rather than keep pushing their own formulaic investments. Even critics aren't going to stop reviewing big-name movies on the grounds that they're all the same recycled shit; reviews of recycled shit likely still earns them far more than their other reviews combined.
    • cholantesh 9y ago
• rgbrenner 9y ago
  No one is killing the movie industry. Here are the stats: http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/MPAA-Theatrical-Market-Statistics-2016_Final.pdf http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/MPAA-Theatric...
  • ardit33 9y ago
    Good find, seems that the industry is doing just fine: 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).
  • platz 9y ago
    and yet the referenced article in the piece [1] doesn't seem to keep the execs from complaining "studio head honchos lay the blame for several months of horrific box office numbers — the worst in 20 years — on the website": [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/business/media/rotten-tomatoes-box-office.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/business/media/rotten-tom...
    • kurthr 9y ago
      Exactly! Proving that movie execs are good at making S#!& up that makes them money... and selling it to the media.
  • NumberCruncher 9y ago
    The doc starts with a picture of a stupid time-travel sci-fi nonsense, ends with a picture of a stupid magic-monster harrypotter nonsense, in the middle with a picture of the remake of The magnificent seven. Which was the remake of Kurosawa's The 7 samurai. This is only entertaining if you are 14 or you have spent the last 35 years in a cave without contact to the outside world. What is killing the movie industry again?
• Legion 9y ago
  Some of the good material that would have been turned into movies in the past gets turned into television/streaming shows now. Game of Thrones occupies the kind of cultural space that something like Star Wars did during the original trilogy. It's not that that material doesn't exist, it's simply that it no longer is the sole domain of the movie format.
  • 2bitencryption 9y ago
    > Game of Thrones occupies the kind of cultural space that something like Star Wars did during the original trilogy. 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.
• jknoepfler 9y ago
  Although RT tends to produce false positives for me, it is a reasonably reliable filter. If Hollywood is suffering, I'd look to the quality of its product. For example, marvel civil war is a false positive (for me). When I watch it, I can't get past the clipped, contrived dialogue, close-ups on faces, ham-fisted plots, inconceivably stupid action, schizophrenic scene changes, plastic cgi, and awkward obviously demographically targeted identity fantasies. But the movie Valerian and the city of a thousand planets, which was panned on RT, was in almost every way actually objectively worse than its well rated marvel counterpart. It was so bad it made me fill physically ill. Through accumulated experience, I've found that RT, for me, is a reasonable predictor of "a very bad time." And even if its high ratings don't consistently predict a good time, they do predict relative enjoyability well. I've had so many awful movie going experiences over the last twenty years of adulthood that I've more or less stopped going. I have a very hard time blaming a rating system. I'd look instead to very shallow, implausible scripting (punchy one-liners, hollow melodrama), lackluster cinematography (zoomed in facials, schizophrenic shot switching), repetitive and/or assinine plots (corporations are eeevil), weird editing and incoherent writing (random, poorly interjected side stories or comedy, bizarre scene shifts, prolonged melodrama), boring, implausible, drawn out action (ugh), predictable demographically targeted identity fantasies, and I don't know, the list goes on. I know beyond certainty that I'm not the target audience, but I can't help but think people are increasingly demanding movies that repay rather than punish sustained attention, and I can't help but think that these qualities passively improve the commercial value of the Hollywood product. Edit: grammar, removed repetition.
  • Sangermaine 9y ago
    It sounds like you've been going to the wrong movies, at least for your tastes. You seem to be exclusively seeing blockbusters. Maybe you'd prefer smaller, less action-focused films.
    • ericd 9y ago
      Eh, I love a good action movie, but it's hard to get into movies that you can't believe. I watched a very low rated one from the 80s the other day (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blood_of_heroes/ https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blood_of_heroes/), and while it had very little plot, and the production value was incredibly low compared to recent movies, and just generally wasn't a very good movie, I enjoyed it more than the vast majority of very expensive recent blockbusters, because it felt real. They had real actors and real stunts. They moved like real people. And in that world, a 50 foot fall could kill them, rather than just cause them to touch a knee, so there was something at stake. In a movie full of invincible people, who cares what happens? They'll be fine regardless. I wish hollywood would get to making movies about real people.
• socratewasright 9y ago
  The issue with movies is that they are constrained to a 2 hour window. There is only so much character development, nuancing and world building you can do in such a short time frame. TV shows have hours upon hours to build up their story. Another thing that bugs me is that directors keep reusing the same big shot actors, many of whom are not worth their price tag in my opinion. Acting isn't rocket science. With enough practice, any graduate from an acting school could do well. Why not try new blood more often? It would drive production costs down and add variety to casts. Straying away from the usual body models wouldn't hurt either. After seeing Tom Cruise lookalike #4, I would gladly welcome anything but a #5.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• alister 9y ago
  Talking about gaming the ratings and user reviews on sites likes IMDB, I surprised by how often it doesn't happen. The Matrix at this moment has 1,336,956 user votes and 3739 user reviews -- and that's to be expected. But I regularly come across movies on IMDB that have less than 10 votes and no user reviews at all. Or a single user review that happens to be negative. These are movies less than 10-15 years old and with budgets of at least $1 million. It's totally puzzling why the director, producers, actors, friends of the cast, or anyone else connected with the movie didn't bother to add a user review. Someone had enough passion to make the movie, spend all that money, work on it for months or years, and they haven't heard of IMDB?
• nacho2sweet 9y ago
  It is $14-$19.50 to see a movie where I live (probably closer to $30-40 after popcorn), I am not going to take a chance with my money on a middling movie when I can just pirate an HD copy in a month now. I will take a chance with my time however. Everything is being made for international audiences now. Everything has to try and be one of the 30 movies a year let into the Chinese market. Plots and messages are dumbed down the lowest denominator now. I can't wait to see what movies are like now that Disney is using face scanning technology on audiences... It is a horrible time for art.
• gozur88 9y ago
  Hollywood movies are getting objectively worse, and there's a good reason for it. The market is global now - the North American box office is just a vehicle for pricing deals when the international rights are sold. So they have to make movies that appeal to the global lowest common denominator. No witty or understated dialog. No cultural signifiers that might be missed by someone from another culture. All the money and effort is going into flashy stuff that someone in Beijing will appreciate just as much as someone in Los Angeles. Thus all the superhero garbage and Michael Bay style action.
  • thadjo 9y ago
    this is such an underappreciated point. many US movies are now developed with an international audience in mind.
  • lisper 9y ago
    > So they have to make movies that appeal to the global lowest common denominator 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.
    • gozur88 9y ago
      That movie illustrates my point, though. Domestic box office for Get Out was $175m with foreign receipts coming in at just $77m. Compare that to Guardians of the Galaxy, with domestic box office of $333m and foreign box office of $440m. They made more money outside the US than in, with China topping the totals. Sure, you can still make money with a movie aimed at the domestic audience, but you can make a lot more money with one that isn't.
      • lisper 9y ago
        Yes, but you have to look at ROI, not gross receipts. GotG cost $232M to make. Get Out cost $4.5M, so its ROI was about 20x better than GotG.
• notadoc 9y ago
  Perhaps the movie industry is to blame for releasing tons of garbage movies and rehashing tired ideas. They pour a lot of effort into blockbusters and then many decent movies fall under the radar, often to be discovered through, oddly enough, RT or IMDB, or word of mouth. Meanwhile, shows on Netflix and HBO are very popular, quite good, and manage to have good RT ratings.
• pasbesoin 9y ago
  You know, if RT ratings are "unfair" and don't "reflect the public's experience/preference", the public will figure this out, quick enough. If RT continues to suppress your audiences, maybe that's for a good reason. And, maybe it's not RT. Stop bitching about the other guy's product, and start fixing your own.
• ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
  Part of this includes giving all my favorite series to JJ Abrams to turn into charmless, box ticked, nostalgia milked, super polished hollow 'visual experiences'. The grit, the charm, the lovable clumsy parts, and most of all originality are all missing.
• OneTimePaddy 9y ago
  Hollywood just has 2 hours- and in those two hours cant win against the great novel story tellers of our times- tv-series. So they made it rollercoaster rides - filled with sfx and instant soup stories. Which just is not the value, people now are used too. The irony is that rick and morty like animated series show- that you can squeeze incredibble stories into the smallest format. You just have to be willing to risk it. But hollywoods movies have become to big to whale.
• horusthecat 9y ago
  ...except neither is, and Hollywood accounting is a real thing. Even domestic-market box office failures tend to turn a profit internationally.
• oh_sigh 9y ago
  RT isn't killing the movie industry, but bad predictors or review engines are certainly not helping consumers. If any website ever shows you some kind of function(eg average) of the general population's perspective, and you are using it to determine if will like it or not, it will probably be wrong. Just as there is no 'average human', there is no average movie. A movie which is universally panned by most people may be adored by some. Ratings can only make sense within an egocentric data model.
• EdwardCoffin 9y ago
  It seems to me that people are a lot harsher on movies now, less willing or able to suspend disbelief [1]. I see scathing assessments of sequels, but with examples of the imagined problems being problems that have reasonably close equivalents in their predecessors which no one had a problem with when those were released. Here's a concrete example: probably the most commonly cited 'problem' I hear about Prometheus is that near the end of the movie the heroine "tried to run away from a wheel in a straight line", and therefore it is a bad movie. The general criticism I take from this is not that she took the reasonable general action (running away) but the specific course she took (running in a straight line so the wheel just followed, and not noticing it was following). The thing is, I think that both the main previous movies in the series, Alien and Aliens, have comparable incidents which no one complains about. In Alien, near the end of the movie when she was the sole remaining survivor, we had Ripley delaying her escape in the shuttle in order to scuttle the ship - an entirely pointless action. If her plan of escape in the shuttle had worked, it wouldn't matter whether the alien were still alive. What did she think it would do, learn how to fly the Nostromo and pursue her? Scuttling the ship both increased her risk of dying at the alien's hands (it could have easily snuck up on her when she was engrossed in the scuttling procedure), and also nearly caught her in the explosion. In Aliens, we had Ripley delaying her escape with Newt from the processing plant in order to exterminate the room full of eggs which posed no immediate threat to her (especially those still in the egg sac). Further to this, she did not bother to spend even one bullet or grenade on the queen herself. Ripley expended virtually all of her ammunition on this task, not reserving any to cover her retreat, and she apparently did not bother packing a spare magazine despite being given the resources of a fully-stocked armoury when she was preparing to go get Newt. If she had not exterminated the eggs (pointless, given the impending explosion) the queen would not have had reason to personally follow her and cause all the subsequent grief. Needless to say, those problems could also have been averted by simply shooting the queen along with or instead of the eggs. Again, no one complains about this. Note that I am not complaining about the above aspects of Alien or Aliens. I love both those movies, and think the examples I gave above are nit-picking. The thing is, I think the criticism of Prometheus is also nit-picking, and directly comparable. My tentative hypothesis for this recent nit-picking is that, unlike the earlier movies which were from a pre-internet era, it is easy for people to congregate in online communities to pick apart inconsistencies in movies they were personally disappointed in, and then anyone who looks at discussions of a movie they just saw will read all of this stuff they might have otherwise just overlooked. Further to the particular example I chose above, lots of people were disappointed with Prometheus particularly because it was not what they wanted: another formulaic Alien or Aliens movie, so that gave them extra incentive to pick it apart. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief
• Dowwie 9y ago
  Is there a greater money grab than Transformers?
• thuris 9y ago
  Georg Rockall-Schmidt released a fine video on essentially the same subject, yesterday: https://youtu.be/VVdh6-4Hgys https://youtu.be/VVdh6-4Hgys
• alexasmyths 9y ago
  Rotten Tomatoes is a bad system because it's binary - ie thumbs up/down. Which means a 'consistently good' film can get almost all thumbs up - even if it's not that-that good. Whereas an unevenly good films, with pangs of genius can get not so many thumbs up. It tends to skew way up or down. Metacritic I think is much better.
  • LeoNatan25 9y ago
    Why would you stop at the binary initial impression, though? All the information you need is one click away.
• coldcode 9y ago
  I prefer to watch Cinema Sins on youtube, its more entertaining than the movies it describes.
• LeoNatan25 9y ago
  I fear the conclusion here does not stand the test of reality either, sadly, as many quality films have gone overlooked by audiences despite fantastic word of mouth and reviews. Is big part of it the terrible taste of the audience? I'm sure. Is there a new trend of the same audience to spend less on cinema? Yes, but it may not be due to the low quality output (hasn't stopped them before). I think television—including Netflix, Hulu, etc.—is the culprit. There is just so much quality television being produced, that people don't want to leave the house. Much more convenient, cheaper, etc. Let's hope this quality television brushes on the taste of the audience and it demands similar rise in quality from films.
• 6stringmerc 9y ago
  It's funny a guy working for a Print medium being linked via digital has any grounding to talking about what is killing what. Bro, you're re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Film is changing at the pace of technology, and Rotten Tomatoes will have its time and then the next generation will go elsewhere. You know, because IMDB and its comment section totally killed the movie industry. Wait, scratch that. It didn't. It turned into a cesspool and life moved on. Or, as Dr. Malcom might put it, "life, uh, finds a way."
• julianj 9y ago
  I tried to read this on my phone twice and was twice thwarted with full screen ads I could not close. I am grateful for the title that may tell me all I need to know.
• newscracker 9y ago
  Movie ratings from Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB or another site will always have exceptions where the rating doesn't match one's perception (after watching). But they give something to start with when deciding whether or not to check out a movie or read further about it and/or watch trailers, etc. That "initial push" is what I rely on these sites for - in other words, they help indicate whether a movie is a dud or not. For me, the Rotten Tomatoes rule of "60%+ approval as fresh" doesn't work quite well. So I rely a bit more on IMDB ratings and the top reviews. If I had to rely only on RT, I'd have missed many movies that I personally enjoyed (sorry, don't remember the names/ratings). As a rule, I usually avoid anything rated below 5 on IMDB, but I do like checking some movies out for the cast, even if the story, script, direction, editing, etc., are awful. In fact, looking at the cast is one of the ways I look for movies, and I sometimes binge watch one particular actor's movies to catch up with older ones that either weren't super hits or were made at a time when the actor wasn't yet well known. Those are usually so heartwarming to watch and get the breadth and depth of the actor's capabilities and also see how they have grown or changed over time. There are also differences between how some movie critics, with a lot of knowledge and deep appreciation for certain aspects of movies and movie making, look at and rate a movie vs. how an average person (like me) would. Many people just want to be entertained when they watch a movie or show. There are fewer, in proportion, that have high standards for all aspects of movies. Even many people who claim to be "movie buffs" or write movie reviews on their personal blogs aren't as stringent. The masses need a more balanced view between what's strictly critical and what's strictly sheer entertainment value.
• jokoon 9y ago
  Personally I just go to wikipedia, jump to the "reception" part, and see what rotten tomatoes or metacritic tells about it. People tell me I should not trust critics, but I really don't want to waste 2 hours of my time. Generally critics are accurate, and RT offers an audience rating too to give some contrast.
• bachaco 9y ago
  Anyone else thinks this is just a Rotten Tomatoes publicity campaign?
  • edoloughlin 9y ago
    Don't think so, reading to the end: 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).