Rotten Tomatoes Introduces a New Audience Rating For People Who Actually Bought a Ticket (indiewire.com) 48
Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango are rolling out a new "Verified Hot" rating for users who actually bought a ticket to the movie being reviewed. "The designation is only given to theatrical movies that have reached an audience score above 90 percent among user ratings," adds IndieWire. From the report: Movie ticketing app Fandango is the parent company to Rotten Tomatoes, so if you bought your ticket through Fandango and then rated a movie using that same user info on Rotten Tomatoes, RT is able to confirm you bought a ticket and can filter out anyone else who may just be rating things blindly. A rep for RT tells IndieWire the goal is to work with other partners so that other people who don't use Fandango can still be considered verified.
Rotten Tomatoes also expanded its Popcornmeter designations. Anything with an audience score above 60 percent of people rating it as 3.5 stars or higher will be labeled "Hot," and movies below that 60 percent threshold are now "Stale." The "Certified Fresh" badge for movies that achieve a strong enough critics score has been around for a while, but in 2020 RT introduced a "Top Critics" feature such that you could filter out the dozens or hundreds of aggregated critics from unreliable sources who could be skewing a film's score. Anyone can vote or rate movies on Rotten Tomatoes if you're an audience member, but you can also filter out ratings from those not considered "verified."
Rotten Tomatoes made some other tweaks too under the hood: Both the Popcornmeter and Tomatometer need to meet a new minimum number of reviews published for a score to appear. Not everything gets reviewed widely, so the threshold varies depending on a film's total projected domestic box office forecast. A full list of "Verified Hot" films can be found here.
Rotten Tomatoes also expanded its Popcornmeter designations. Anything with an audience score above 60 percent of people rating it as 3.5 stars or higher will be labeled "Hot," and movies below that 60 percent threshold are now "Stale." The "Certified Fresh" badge for movies that achieve a strong enough critics score has been around for a while, but in 2020 RT introduced a "Top Critics" feature such that you could filter out the dozens or hundreds of aggregated critics from unreliable sources who could be skewing a film's score. Anyone can vote or rate movies on Rotten Tomatoes if you're an audience member, but you can also filter out ratings from those not considered "verified."
Rotten Tomatoes made some other tweaks too under the hood: Both the Popcornmeter and Tomatometer need to meet a new minimum number of reviews published for a score to appear. Not everything gets reviewed widely, so the threshold varies depending on a film's total projected domestic box office forecast. A full list of "Verified Hot" films can be found here.
ok... (Score:2)
I see the benefit to them in having reviews by people who actually saw the film... but what's in it for me?
Why would I want to give them my info?
Re:ok... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does anyone post a review in the first place? They want to share their opinion.
This just gives them a "stronger" way to share their opinion, and since we humans love sharing our opinions, it will likely be popular among reviewers ... if they can get past the Fandango-required part (fuck that service ... I got a gift card to them years ago, but it didn't work, and they refuse to refund me).
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I'm sure the pay-to-play aspect factored in, too. Get people to spend money so their online voice is slightly "louder". Like Twitter when they were letting people buy those blue checkmarks.
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It started with Star Wars part 99456 reviews (Score:2)
Just follow the money and their commercial partnerships...
Rotten Tomatoes is, like IMDB now, just an extension of the movie industry with the same needs and profit motives of any widely read movie industry new source:
- Advertising of new movies ...
- Exclusive behind the scenes, interviews, etc, etc.
- Promotion of older movies
- Post-Oscar win/nomination promotion of movies
- A place to hang movie trailer advertisements
- And owned by Fandango a movie ticket seller
Essentially Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB are conver
Re: (Score:2)
Deadpool & Wolverine is a great example of how a movie can be rated by wildly different criteria with wildly different results.
It was both awesome and a pile of crap depending on your expectations. The story was incredibly weak. There was not a single character the movie made you care about. But it delivered cameos, callbacks, Easter eggs, shocking and tasteless jokes, and some entertaining fight scenes. It also was great PR for a failing MCU as it mocked the failings of other movies openly.
You can
Re: ok... (Score:2)
The idea is to make the "verified" reviews carry money weight and therefore the score is more trustworthy and supposedly less susceptible to astroturfing or other brigading of the score.
Re: ok... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: ok... (Score:2)
The commenter I was replying to asked "what's in it for me?" That's what I was replying to. The benefit for consumers is allegedly more trustworthy scores, because they are influenced by people who (supposedly) have seen the movie and not just some rando posting their opinion for other reasons.
For a system like that to work you need an input of "verified" opinions on the movie. So others benefit from your reviews, and you benefit from theirs.
Re: (Score:2)
For a system like that to work you need an input of "verified" opinions on the movie. So others benefit from your reviews, and you benefit from theirs.
Ok. I am being asked to link a review account to a purchase account, which is linked to a credit card, which has my real name and location linked. In exchange I get more reliable reviews.
I will probably still pass, but I can see the value being offered.
I go to the movie theater pretty often. I like watching movies in the theater. I don't use Fandango, or MovieWatcher, or any of the other memberships. I just pay for my ticket and watch the movie. I don't work Mondays, so $8 for an afternoon matinee at
Re: ok... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
To combat brigading, they should instead make everyone rate the movie as better or worse than the last verified one they saw, then use the Condorcet method to rank all the movies in order from worst to best.
Re: (Score:2)
For the same reason you give your reviews to slashdot. It's a website that talks about things you like, you have hobby in common with the community members, and they value your opinion.
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Not people who saw the film. People who bought the ticket through fandango. Which if your movie cost say... 120 million + marketing costs and the outlook does not look good because it's a poorly written pile of dogshit that's more of a parody of the material it's supposed to be based on than anything else *cough* Borderlands *cough* doing something like investing 15k to buy up a bunch of day one tickets and have them post glowing reviews becomes a really cheap investment to try and get at least some butts i
Re: (Score:2)
And benefit to other potential viewers as well. Most "reviews" are just people who don't like the movie for some reason outside its content - the actors, directors, the company making it etc. They haven't actually seen it.
Brilliant and harmless marketing (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
This is great because it will likely bring audience scores lower, close to critic scores, because who have invested the time and money to see a movie may be less charitable if it fails to meet expectations.
What you'll end up with are those people who think The Lord of the Rings is the greatest movie ever followed by people who are shockingly disappointed they didn't just tie the ring to a piece of string and have the Eagles drop it in the volcano. The whole thing could have been in over less than half an
Re:Brilliant and harmless marketing (Score:5, Funny)
My grandmother fell firmly in the latter category. She was visiting once at my father's place while it was on the TV and she turned to me and said:
"I've been watching this movie for hours. They schlepped over here, they schlepped over there. What are they trying to do?"
Me: "Well grandma, they're trying to get rid of a ring."
"Couldn't they just flush it down the toilet? I've lost a few rings that way. Don't they have any toilets?"
So yep, if my grandma had reviewed LOTR, it would probably be something along the lines of "Too much schlepping, not enough toilets."
Re: (Score:2)
For me, stories where things need to be, or have been, disposed/lost/hidden so they're supposedly never found and the item wasn't simply randomly dropped over a very deep spot in the ocean always seem suspect. Granted, stories that start with "Tell me where it is!" and the answer is, "I dropped it in the ocean somewhere" would be very short.
Re: (Score:3)
LOTR is essentially just a fictional war story wrapped in elaborate fantasy metaphors. Only Tolkien truly knew what the ring was intended to represent, and he was adamant that his works were not merely an allegory for the real-world conflict that he'd experienced as a veteran. Still, it's hard to watch and not acknowledge the parallels between sending two infantry troops to go behind enemy lines to complete a dangerous mission because those were the orders, and the Hobbits' task to dispose of the ring.
Re:Brilliant and harmless marketing (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not a LOTR fan, so my knowledge of the lore may be flawed, but I always thought the idea was that the Ring was so dangerous, that simply hiding it where it could never be found wasn't enough, it had to be physically destroyed. Sort of, nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure, kind of thing.
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That's literally the plot to Titanic and that movie was like 5 hours long.
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That's literally the plot to Titanic and that movie was like 5 hours long.
And the survey vessel still didn't find the necklace! In any case, this wasn't some random place as the location of the Titanic is pretty well known. Now if someone had been blindfolded, spun around a few times and thrown the necklace overboard somewhere over Challenger Deep at the Mariana Trench then the movie would have had to be about James Cameron himself searching for it in his deep-sea submersible Deepsea Challenger -- probably a more interesting, though less emotional, movie. :-) And even that is
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe, maybe not. There's a fundamental difference in expectation between critics and audiences. When you're a critic and your job is professionally to see a movie you're looking for some certain things that trigger you positively, when you review a lot of movies you need something to stand out. You also end up comparing genres against each other.
On the flip side as an audience member you may be critical, you may be not critical. You may be up for nostalgia and a good time. You may not know the intricacies
Re: (Score:2)
There's a fundamental difference in expectation between critics and audiences.
Critics: Tropes! Cinematography! Sub-plots! Artistic interpretations! Meaningful expressions of the human experience!
Average audience members: Stuff exploded? Nice.
Re: (Score:2)
Critic scores are almost always high for the worst movies. They don't always rate on enjoyment. Most films that prioritize representation over story plots have incredible reviews, yet always have the worst audience scores.
I think the ratings will ultimately be higher since most people who pass on the film will no longer rate solely on the reason that they passed. I'm not saying that's good or bad. But, it will make it harder for me to determine if I want to watch a film. I'll be forced to find specific "cri
Re: (Score:2)
Critics are bought and paid for by the studios (Score:2)
Most reviews by critics are comically shill pieces paid for by the studios. It is not uncommon for critics' ratings to be absurdly high while the audience ratings are ridiculously low.
Also, no, no regular people will be buying more tickets through Fandango just to post a review to Rotten Tomatoes. As already pointed by other comments above, all that will happen is that studios will buy their own tickets to post more fake reviews and in
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It will probably bring audience scores up. The Last Jedi is the classic example of that. Reading the discourse on social media you would think it was terrible, but polls of people leaving cinemas having just watched it rated it highly.
Addressing review bombing by people with an ideological axe to grind will likely bring scores more into line with critics, with many going up and a few going down.
Re: Brilliant and harmless marketing (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Addressing review bombing by people with an ideological axe to grind would be getting rid of the critic scores.
Funny how it's only "review bombing" when it's the filthy deploraproles voicing unsanctioned opinions instead of sitting down and taking what they're given. When it's the trust fund brigade literally libeling and extorting people suddenly it's fine.
Re: (Score:1)
We will soon find out I guess. I strongly suspect that most of the review bombers have not actually seen the thing they are bombing.
Re: (Score:2)
. I strongly suspect that most of the review bombers have not actually seen the thing they are bombing.
You don't need to suspect anything. They regularly admit they've never watched/played the thing they're "Reviewing" and routinely get caught flat out lying. Like the recent review bomb of Black Myth: Wukong where the review bomber was caught red handed using an absurd machine translation and even admitted to not actually knowing anything at all about the developers or the game they were outright libeling.
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Do you have a link? I couldn't immediately find it with Google. From what I read that game was well received in both China and the West. Interesting for a story based on Chinese folk law.
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It was phenomenally well received, except by review-bombers who wrote a malicious hit piece using a fake translation [twitter.com] in what appears to be an attempt to extort money from the developers for their friends.
"Nice game you have there, be a shame if a major website were to libel you throughout the english speaking world. But we can make sure no misunderstandings happen as long as you hire our friends here as 'consultants'."
They've doubled down on this to the point the review-bombers are now inventing absurd delu
Re: (Score:2)
Obviously it'd be better if there were other ways to verify reviewers have actually seen the movie without this one company having a monopoly over it, but even if the business incentive was there for them to do so I don't know what would be practical.
A genuine question. (Score:2)
Did they ask users for permission before linking the accounts or just do it? I know it's not as creepy as some of the more egregious account link-ups we've heard about, but I still would rather see that "choice" be in the user's hands. If they did ask? Forget about me. But something tells me they didn't, because big tech loves to just do whatever they want with user data.
What's Fandango's market coverage? (Score:2)
Has something dramatic shifted in the market, such that a significant fraction of ticket sales are done through Fandango now? I haven't seen them mentioned for years.
Are they just relying on the Fandango population being a fair representation of the general paying movie-going public? Because it's not likely to be, given Fandango's surcharges; price-sensitive viewers will naturally tend to avoid them.
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Hard to rate using data they don't have.
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There is no need for them to already be a large app to promote their services, why would you think there needs to be a threshold for that? They have a community of people with an ego who enjoy writing in "authoritative" style. They hope that many members of their community members will be happy to pay extra on the ticket app for the privilege of writing "verified" reviews.
Those who don't care don't have care about that at all, and those who have a plus-sized ego will be happy to pay. It's not even a subscri
If you trust Rotten Tomato's Critic reviews. (Score:1)
The critic score are rarely unbiased, mostly from straight up shills...
And on behest of corporate entertainment companies, to keep the audience scores higher, RT actively removes negative audience reviews -- doesn't matter if they're legit, which most of them have been.
When the shills gush over a movie or show, and when their are tons of obvious bot created 5 star ratings(generic praises that are barely a sentence), that's
Am I cynical? (Score:2)
Reviews? (Score:2)