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Movie Studios Are Blaming Rotten Tomatoes For Killing Movies No One Wants To See (qz.com)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Baywatch were never going to be critical darlings. Both movies led the domestic box office to its worst Memorial Day weekend showing in nearly 20 years. Quartz adds: In the fallout, are Hollywood producers blaming the writers? The actors? Themselves? (Of course not.) No, they are blaming Rotten Tomatoes. They say the movie-review site, which forces critics to assign either a rotten or fresh tomato to each title when submitting reviews, regardless of the nuances of their critiques, poisoned viewers against the films before they were released. "Insiders close to both films blame Rotten Tomatoes, with Pirates 5 and Baywatch respectively earning 32% and 19% Rotten. The critic aggregation site increasingly is slowing down the potential business of popcorn movies. Pirates 5 and Baywatch aren't built for critics but rather general audiences, and once upon a time these types of films -- a family adventure and a raunchy R-rated comedy -- were critic-proof. Many of those in the industry severely question how Rotten Tomatoes computes the its ratings, and the fact that these scores run on [the movie-ticket buying site] Fandango (which owns RT) is an even bigger problem," Deadline reported. [...] The site has a separate score that measures audience reception, which it displays next to the critic rating. And quite a few smell what The Rock is cooking -- 70% of Baywatch viewers on Rotten Tomatoes said they liked it. But the critic score is what many people look to when deciding whether to spend their hard-earned money at the cinema. Also read: Hollywood Producer Blames Rotten Tomatoes For Convincing People Not To See His Movie.
I looked up movie times on Google. It had a sidebar with a metacritic score that seemed low. I followed that and saw actual reviews, which were also (in the aggregate) pretty bad. Are all of those equally at fault?
This is for Pirates 5, by the way. Part of the reason I looked is because Pirates 4 was already really disappointing compared to the first three, and Depp has been in a death spiral for years. That and the appearance of yet more dead/undead pirates (how many different ways is that even possible) in the previews had me seriously worried. If all of that hadn't already been hanging over the movie, I wouldn't have bothered to second-guess my impulse to just go down and watch it.
I'll still see it, by the way, just put it off until it's on Redbox.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
While I agree there are some good movies that have poor Rotten Tomatoes ratings which makes me wonder if I missed a movie because of RT reviews, I would still consider them to be a pretty good indicator of movie quality. The studios are just mad that RT tells me what I need to know about crappy movies before I spend my money on them!
I never look at critic's scores, just whether the audience liked it. Critics have a tendency to be windbags...
Review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are incredibly useful... yet also promote groupthink and over simplify the value of a film. I've really enjoyed some films that most critics panned, and I've really disliked films that most critics adored. By distilling the value of a film down to a fresh/rotten percentage (much like Siskel and Ebert's thumbs up or down system of yore) it encourages people to stop there and not read the reviews to find out what does or doesn't appeal to the reviewers.
Now, applying this logic to the apparent failure of yet another 'Pirates' movie seems like a major stretch. As for Baywatch, I don't know.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
They can't give writers more creative freedom. Nor directors.
The problem is they are locked into a formula. If they're going to spend $500 Million to make a movie, then they have got to guarantee it will be a success and recoup the investment.
So they can't take risks. Can't be innovative. A movie must follow one of Hollywood's formulas for success. And this is the very thing making movies bad.
Here's another idea: How about a movie that doesn't cost $500 Million to make? Don't get a-list actors. Could there possibly be very good but unknown actors? Don't make the movie effects heavy. Do have a good story -- oh but that would require giving more creative freedom, which brings us back to the start.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Never mind that all they're able to do is either come up with sequels or prequels, or movies with brain-dead characters and insipid stories filled with impossible computer-generated action scenes.
None of that even prevents a movie from being great. There are plenty of great movies based on previous IP, and even great movies with little to no story.
I strongly disagree with the submitter's comment: "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Baywatch were never going to be critical darlings." That is bullshit. The first Pirate of the Caribbean movie had a Rotten Tomatoes score of 79%, so obviously a good movie can be made with this subject matter. And 21 Jump Street had a score of 85%, so obviously a movie adaption of an 80's/90's TV show can be a great movie.
Either of these movies could have been great with a 70+ Rotten Tomato score. But they would have had to be good.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The problem with Toxic Feminism is that it views as toxic anything masculine, unless it is a woman with balls the size of Bayonne. The problem I have with this, is that it doesn't ever embrace the true strengths of women as virtuous on their own merit. The unreal expectation that a woman can bear the part of a man, with exceptional strength, skill and agility is part of the problem, short of the superhero genre.
There are rare exceptions, where a strong woman character fits the script, the genre and doesn't go overboard with the Machismo Woman character. I think the original Alien movie makes a great example. But the whole movie wasn't about a bad ass woman going to town, it was about a normal woman going to town. The power of two "mother" figures out to protect their "young". Classic play missed by the feminists, and douchebag men equally, because they are overtly looking at things completely wrong.
There are lots of other strong characters built around women, and it is sad to see them play second fiddle to Wolverine movies. Not that those were unwatchable, but Black Widow (Avengers) probably needs her own movie, where we can see her full skillset, not just her badass fighting techniques.
But we get Wonderwoman so .... there is that.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Yep, this is Hollywood complaining yet again that they don't control all the information. I still remember when "Gigli" came out and flopped, and Hollywood was pissed off that moviegoers were using their phones to text all their friends about how bad the movie was, saying they shouldn't be allowed to do that because it "disrupts our carefully crafted marketing".
You're overthinking this. The real reason I'm not watching Baywatch or Pirates of the Caribbean 5 is that I spent a lot of money to watch Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and I'm about to spend money to watch Wonder Woman this weekend and The Mummy next weekend.
If either of those films or even the King Arthur disaster had come out in January or February, the only popcorn junky cheesefest competition was XXX: The Return of Xander Cage. They would probably have done twice as well then versus what they'll get now. As it is, April to September is neck deep in silly adventure and action movies. I'm going to skip plenty of films I might otherwise watch just because I don't have the time and money to catch them all.
I don't even look at Rotten Tomatoes.