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>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. This i

>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. This is demonstrably untrue. Here is a link (along the left column) of the top RT movies for each year from 2014-2016: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/ https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/ Sure there are some blockbusters, but there are also many excellent, interesting, engaging, even daring films like Moonlight, Hell or Highwater, Manchester by the Sea, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, It Follows, Boyhood, Nightcrawler, and Birdman. And those are just among the top 10 scores for each year; if you expanded to movies in the 90% range of each year you'd have a large number of excellent choices. I couldn't find a list of the top-rated RT movies for 2017, but (I think) currently the highest-rated among them is Get Out, a film specifically made to be the precise opposite of "bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive". I submit that you simply choose to watch bad movies.

slg 9y ago
How does that demonstrate what I said wasn't true? My point wasn't that all movies are bad or that good movies don't score well on RT. My point was that RT doesn't incentivize good movies. It incentives average and risk-averse movies. It is also worth noting that none of the movies you listed are targeted at wide audiences. The most successful of the list was a surprise hit in Mad Max and even that was just outside the 20 biggest movies of its respective year. The others probably didn't even end up in the top 50 of the year. If you look at the top box office draws you will find the kind of movies I am talking about.
- Veedrac 9y ago
  The Princess Kaguya is ranked 14th of 2014 and seems like a perfect counterexample: it managed this despite being a major risk (which resulted in a major box office failure). Unfortunately Rotten Tomatoes can't save a controversial foreign film no matter how good, but it seems that if RT was scoring risk takers poorly Kaguya wouldn't be up there.

slg 9y ago

How does that demonstrate what I said wasn't true? My point wasn't that all movies are bad or that good movies don't score well on RT. My point was that RT doesn't incentivize good movies. It incentives average and risk-averse movies. It is also worth noting that none of the movies you listed are targeted at wide audiences. The most successful of the list was a surprise hit in Mad Max and even that was just outside the 20 biggest movies of its respective year. The others probably didn't even end up in the top 50 of the year. If you look at the top box office draws you will find the kind of movies I am talking about.

Veedrac 9y ago
The Princess Kaguya is ranked 14th of 2014 and seems like a perfect counterexample: it managed this despite being a major risk (which resulted in a major box office failure). Unfortunately Rotten Tomatoes can't save a controversial foreign film no matter how good, but it seems that if RT was scoring risk takers poorly Kaguya wouldn't be up there.