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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 opening weekends.
The best part is that the quote above even provides a link to the reference they are using for the made statement.[0] In effect, the studios are complaining that news of the films' crappiness are spreading too fast.
Let that sink in. The studios confess that their productions are so awful they couldn't be used even for guano. It's almost as if the availability of reviews was the reason for such bad box office performance - not the dubious quality of the object being reviewed.
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.
0: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/summer-box-office-how-...
> 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.
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>
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/
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
I never trust any online reviews, especially aggregate reviews, because I have never found any to hew remotely closely to my taste (the best example is on RT, the worst movie I've seen in the last two decades is rated 95% fresh).
The only approach I've found that works is to pick a professional reviewer that is marginally close to my taste, read a lot of their reviews, so I know where I tend to agree and where I disagree with the reviewer, then build a mental translation, so when I would see Roger Ebert trash a David Lynch movie, I could discount it because I know Ebert's antipathy to Lynch in not something I share.
I love RT, but I think people misinterpret the percentage. It doesn't mean that the film was 95% 'good', it means there was a 95% chance you'd like the film and a 5% chance you'd dislike it based on a sampling of professional reviews.
Something to bear in mind is that a slight above mediocre film can have a 100% rating if it has wide appeal.
>The only approach I've found that works is to pick a professional reviewer that is marginally close to my taste
I miss David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz.
I'm curious, what was the 95% fresh movie that you thought was the worst movie in 2 decades?
Rotten tomatoes usually matches my personal tastes pretty well. Their Critics Consensus summaries are pretty blunt and entertaining sometimes. Here's the one for Fantastic Four (2015). "Dull" is my favorite part.
"Dull and downbeat, this Fantastic Four proves a woefully misguided attempt to translate a classic comic series without the humor, joy, or colorful thrills that made it great."
Reminds me of this [1] movie poster for "Legend" that does a great job of turning a 2 star review from The Guardian into what appears to be 4 stars.
[1]https://twitter.com/benfraserlee/status/641368752798306304
Having done a little bit of work on stuff like this for Fandango a long time ago I learned a little bit about their view of customers from their marketing folks.
Their average customer is a person that sees all the big blockbuster movies. They are not discerning about what they see and they are not critical viewers.
Comparing these people's reviews to the professionals on Rotten Tomatoes is a little silly. As mentioned, Fandango has no motive to reduce the ratings, the more "must see" movies there are, the more money they make.
edit having read more of this article now, I see the issue with Fandango's rounding. Pretty lame.
I'm wary of any website that offers reviews for things they are also trying to sell, like those online systems for buying games (Playstation Network comes to mind). Why would a profit-driven enterprise allow anything to create a negative impression for the user? Amazon seems okay because they have such a wide variety of items: They're getting paid either way.
I've never seen much point in caring about movie ratings. I find very little correlation between my own perception of a movie and the ratings; whether from "professional" critics, or the generic crowd-sourced ones. I just watch stuff that sounds interesting to me. Sure, you hit some stinkers here and there, but I find that acceptable.
Fandango can't be trusted to give an unbiased rating because they're trying to sell you tickets to the movie.
On the other hand, movie studios have a lot to gain by gaming sites such as IMDB and rotten tomatoes while these sites wouldn't exist if their users knew their ratings were paid for. As others have pointed out, I have noticed that movies tend to be very highly rated on IMDB during the first week or two of a movie being released to theaters. With the amount of money on the line I wouldn't be surprised if movie studios were creating fake accounts and reviews on a massive scale in an effort to generate positive ratings, especially if review sites aren't accepting the movie studio's money to fake the rating.
What is the deal with IMDB's ratings? It feels like over time all movies end up rated around a 7.
Maybe of interest to some here is MovieLens[1], a research project from University of Minnesota that makes personalised movie recommendations based on your own ratings. You can dive behind the scenes and switch between different algorithms, compare its predicted score against the average review score, and there's a page with statistics on your own ratings. (Preferred genres, ratings curve, ratio of mainstream to obscure movies, etc.)
After rating 250+ movies on there myself, my own ratings demonstrate the same right-skew graph curve that IMDB and Fandango has in the article.
Note: Rotten Tomatoes is a property of Warner Bros, whose box office revenue was signficantly affected by the ratings last summer.
The author might be mistaken. I think there's a pretty chance this is simply a demographical difference between the sites' visitors, and I'm pretty disappointed this wasn't brought up early on.
Rotten Tomatoes is a hipstometer (if you don't believe me, look at the artsy film festival movies that rank highest there, or read some of the pedantic reviews). Fandango is what a lot of the RT fans would call a "low brow" venue. More Hollywood-ish (huge budget, unrealistic, etc.) movies (transformers, 2012, The Fast & The Furious, etc.) rank well on fandango, but not on Rotten Tomatoes. The really great movies rank well on both (e.g., Captain Philips, Life of Pi, etc.).
It's always been this way. I use a specific formula of Fandango, iTunes and Rotten Tomatoes scores to decide on a movie. If Fandango ranks it 4-5 stars and Rotten Tomatoes ranks it 50-70%, it's usually really good. If the rank is lower on Fandango and higher on Rotten Tomatoes, it's usually a bit too artsy and pretentious for me (I go watch a movie to be entertained, not to stoke my ego).
I usually don't trust on online movie ratings. The only platform that have some ratings similar with my tastes is Letterboxd: http://letterboxd.com
While I generally agree with the sentiment of this article, Rotten Tomatoes and its ilk have problems of their own. Virtually every small-budget independent film on the site winds up with a very high rating, likely thanks to the big-budget hating, pretentious film critics whose reviews it compiles and summarizes. Likely for the same reason, some larger budget films that receive high RT scores from audiences receive low RT scores from professional critics.
In short, it's impossible to trust RT's ratings of independent films, as they just can't all be that good, or its ratings of big budget films, as they can't all be that bad. If a movie looks good to you, go see it - whether or not RT tells you to.
I've noticed a trend with IMDB reviews:
* The rating will be very high around release time, then drop a point or two after a few weeks * The top 1-2 reviews will be 9-10 star. After that will follow a large number of reviews saying the movie was terrible.
I first noticed this with movies that I disliked, and couldn't believe their high imdb rating. For example, I loathed American Hustle, and it had that same pattern.
That movie was around 8.4 when first out, and had a ten star review on top. (I've now noticed the ten star review is gone.)
I really like the hobby(?) project http://www.phi-phenomenon.org/ which attempts to create a definitive weighted-aggregate of movie rankings using:
many different types of lists to measure film quality
... polls of the general public, of academics, of critics,
and of filmmakers. Some of these polls ask respondents to
list their favorite films. Others ask respondents to rate a
large number of films. There are single author lists by
critics, academics, and filmmakers. There are lists that
focus on how films are rated by video guides or on how many
awards the films received. Some lists try to call attention
to obscure films. Others stick to the obvious choices. Some
attempt to measure film quality directly. Others include
factors such as the historical importance of the film.
The use of different types of lists and the statistical
methods used help to minimize the effect of factors other
than quality in order to create a purer measure of a film's
greatness.
It is not perfect, but it is closer to perfect than any
other method is.I usually only check ratings & reviews after watching a movie, just to see what other people think about it.
Seeing how easy it is to game such online ranking systems and how tastes can differ, not only on a personal level but also on the current mood, I simply don't trust the scores without having been able to make up my own opinion.
The same goes for any other aggregate "review" site, e.g. restaurant reviews. Those are even worse for restaurant owners, since a bad review can stick around, even if you used its mentioned points to improve your service.
At least movies don't usually change over time (Star Wars being one of the few exceptions), but it's still annoying to get caught up in a hype only to be bitterly disappointed, or the other way around, finally watching a movie after hearing so many bad things about it and then thoroughly enjoying it, making you wish you had seen it on the large screen instead.
...and not to forget paid social marketing, especially when it's not being disclosed.
> if you ask people about a movie after they’ve paid $15 for it and devoted a couple of hours of their life to it, maybe they’ll have a more favorable opinion of the work. Maybe the profoundly rightward shift in Fandango’s bell curve is just a moviegoer’s version of Stockholm syndrome.
This is called the Endowment Effect[1]. I suspect it happens when you spend a considerable amount of time picking the "right" movie.
Admitting to yourself that you made the wrong pick is harder than consoling yourself that it wasn't so bad after all.
Often times the bias will manifest itself in the subtlest of ways--for example a survey of "How would you rate the movie you picked?" versus "How would you rate the movie?" can skew ratings positively in the case of the former.
What would be interesting is to follow the evolution of big blockbusters on imdb through time. Perhaps I am confused but I think I spotted a pattern where around their release date they have very good ratings and then they trend toward very different ratings. Which feels like the ratings are manipulated during the marketing period.
There are a lot of problems with star ratings in general. I believe they should be normalized to a more sensible distribution. So e.g. exactly 20% of things have 5 stars, and exactly 20% have 3 stars, etc. Or a more gaussian distribution so most things get 3 stars, and truly good or bad things get 1 or 5 stars.
Reviews in general are crap for several reasons.
One is just pure statistics and design. The typical "average" review score is a mean. And a mean tends to bias towards higher scores, especially when the floor isn't zero. Consider Amazon reviews, for example, which is a 1 to 5 star system. Amazon has half-star increments for the average rating, so you'd think that leaves a lot of dynamic range for reviews, but in practice only the very highest averages are worth considering, everything else is a crap shoot. Consider something that is near universally considered bad by reviewers, it takes 3 1-star reviews for every 5-star review to bring the average down to a 2-star. A 2:1 min:max ratings ratio leads to the same average, and a 1:1 ratio leads to 3-stars. A 1:2 ratio (where 1/3 of all customers have an awful experience) results in around a 4-star average. So you have a situation where a 1-star average means something is universally horrid, and 2 through 4 stars are just variations of awfulness, with only 4.5 stars and above meaning that more than 3/4 of reviewers had a good experience.
Obviously the better metric would be a median, or something similar, but that would lower the average ratings and lead to fewer purchases, most likely.
The other big problem, especially with media, is that the ratings are from self-selected groups. In many cases, especially media, the only people who are going to go out of their way to experience something are folks who are going to be predisposed to liking it, while most other people stay away and thus won't even rate it.
All of which is beside the elephant in the room, which is the fact that in art there's no such thing as an objective universal scale of quality. You absolutely cannot place movies, books, television, or games on a linear number line of "quality" and have those numbers be consistent and sensible. The best that you can hope for is a general sense of whether a lot of people like something or not and the intensity of that like, beyond that you need to actually dig into what people are saying, and who, deciding if it's worth the risk to watch/read/etc. and then deciding for yourself how you feel about it.
Anyone that reads /r/movies semi-regularly would have seen this happening a lot.
The posts there are so blatantly advertising it's insulting, though it seems the mods are in on it, they have no interest in changing anything.
I look at RT but I take it with a grain of salt. I've seen many 95%+ movies that I didn't like. My tastes might be different than the mainstream or the critics and I can be picky but, there's also the issue that the number on RT is the percent of people that didn't hate the movie.
So, you can get 100% if everyone thought the movie was just ok but no one thought it sucked. All the reviews could be just mildly positive rather than glowing.
I generally use this settings when looking for a movie on movieo.me: http://imgur.com/X4xsXaX. When I'm extra bored, lazy or uninspired and just want some mindless entertainment, I might filter by movies with decent (70+) IMDB ratings, and allow lower RT and Metacritic scores, although I have regretted this a number of times.
My experience has shown that the only movies worth looking at are rated > 7/10 anything below is mostly crap.
But this only works for movies that are mainstream BUT not too real blockbusters. Because stuff like the fast and the furious or transformers gets good ratings anyways.
But I use such ratings only to get something light on a boring evening.
Mostly I watch ArtHaus stuff and don't look at those ratings.
It might just be sample bias. While users of Rotten Tomatoes are more serious and critical movie watchers, Fandango users are probably more casual movie goers who can enjoy any movie. If I'm out on a date and want to have some fun, I don't care that much about the quality of a movie. Some stupid action flick like Transformers is fine.
I'm even more cautious about yelp ratings!
Noticed while using Fandango's app that the user scores are basically worthless shill scores often around 1.5 stars higher than they should be. They do give the metacritic rating if you click through or for coming soon though.
It always surprises me that most rating sites don't even take the basic step of normalizing their ratings to a more even distribution.
Of all the ratings, IMDB are the most useless of all. Especially for quality movies that have gathered enough of a reputation to be watched by the masses of tv or netflex, who then proceed to rate them low for being "boring".
Pretty much all of those converge on a rating of around 6.2, including some great classics, whilst lots of Hollywood lightweight entertainment has 7+ ratings.
The only good cinema to escape this faith are black & white and non-English speaking movies, because the unwashed masses of IMDB avoid those.
The 4.1 to 4 and a half star rounding up issue happens on the play store too, I think. Surprised no one brought it up.
Hmmmm... I never took online reviews / ratings too seriously. Why would I bother about some random website?
Metacritic
The think to do is find a few reviewers who resonate with you and keep tabs on them. I mostly just see what Armond White tells me to see.
I had no idea Fandango was owned by NBC. I will never buy tickets there now