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Rotten Tomatoes Scores Don't Correlate To Box Office Success or Woes, Research Shows (polygon.com)
Depending on who you ask, Rotten Tomatoes is the reason some movies don't perform at the box office. From a report: Countless movie executives, including producers, have told Deadline and the New York Times that the number atop a movie's page on Rotten Tomatoes signifying whether the majority of critics enjoyed or disliked a movie rules the box office. Director Brett Ratner was quoted as saying "I think it's the destruction of our business" while others have called for its demise. According to research conducted by Yves Bergquist, director of the Data & Analytics Project at USC's Entertainment Technology Center, that's not correct. Bergquist collected data from 150 movies this year that made more than $1 million at the box office. Using those Box Office Mojo numbers and comparing them to the critic and audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, Bergquist then "looked at [the] correlation between scores and financial performance" to determine if there was a linear line that could be drawn between low scores and bad box office performance. Or, more simply, did a lower "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes equate to box office woes? The short answer is no, it didn't. Bergquist's findings confirmed that of the 150 movies surveyed, there was only a 12 percent correlation between a movie receiving a bad score and not performing well at the box office. Summer films saw even less of a correlation, with seven percent of lower-scored movies not performing at the box office.
Critical success doesn't equal commercial success, but if your movie fails commercially, blaming rotten tomatoes makes for a convenient scapegoat.
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Perhaps the difference is found in what Ratner considers a success and what Bergquist considers a success?
If you need a $2 billion revenue to consider a movie successful, then it probably correlates quite well to the Rotten Tomatoes score.
I don't think you can count Rotten Tomotoes ratings as scientific. There is no validation that the reviewer actually SAW the movie. Also, people who SAW the movie, and liked it, aren't forced to review it. Finally, not every moviegoer uses Rotten Tomotoes ratings to determine if they want to see a movie or not.
So, for Hollywood to base its entire success on RT ratings, is stupid.
Perhaps the Rotten Tomatoes score is low, because the movie is bad, and that's why your box office sales are poor.
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So not really surprised on this one.
The professional reviews are usually way off base loving or hating a film. I go by the public's reviews for a better idea if movie is worth my money. Even then you have to factor in the fanboy effect that will sway the numbers for the first day or even first weekend. Fanboy's are worse than the critics they like anything by . For fanboys its a competition more than if it's good or not like whole Marvel vs DC crowd the Star War fans versus the masses.
I say ignore the professional critics check the reviews of the masses, but factor in if they have a fanboy following.
Yep, really tries hard to look like it's missing a verb.
Also: "a linear line" is pretty impressive.
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Now look at marketing expenses and see if there that ads up.
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Rotten Tomatoes caters to trolls that love to have certain actors, directors, or genres. They also cater to the effete that are above the fray of mere entertainment.
Rotten Tomatoes gets no views form me, and when I see the rating, a low score ensures I will be entertained and go through an extra half bucket of popcorn. the lower the better. I just want to be fascinated, or at least overwhelmed by the spectacle.
Sometimes I agree, such as with La La Land, but sometimes we disagree; Keeping Up With the Joneses was funny enough, and I was entertained.
But, but, the movie industry may not know what is appealing beyond comic-book universes and sex. I know too many who do not care to go to a movie. Reserved seating and recliners are both reducing room size and revenue. Concessions will price people out soon. 4K HD may be good enough for direct-to-home releases. Oh, wait, that's called Netflix. Woops.
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Alternative interpretation: People will eat shit when shit is the only thing available to eat. People will still spend money on a mediocre film if there is nothing else to watch. This is why all the foreign films and artsy stuff steers clear of summer releases... otherwise they'd get trounced by DC, Marvel, et al. I'm pretty confident that if you control for the season of the release date, and the other films you compete with on release, you'd find the correlation you are looking for.
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Rotten Tomatoes seems to get it wrong -- at least from the professional reviewer's standpoint. The audience rating is something entirely different, though. That said, I've also had to question that as well over the past year or so.
Bad movies get bad ratings from critics and public alike and fewer people go. Not 100% correlation, but only 7% for summer movies?
Only a 7% correlation says to me that the reviewers aren't plugging or panning movies (in a way that triggers a tomatoes up/down tick)on anything that matters to moviegoers decisions to buy a ticket.
So the research doesn't just discredit the "Rotten Tomatoes killed our film" theory. It also discredits the reviews themselves.
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Without seeing a scatter plot of the data, or other diagnostics such as, outliers, leverage, or residual plots, there's no way to assess the validity or make inferences about the result.
The low correlation may be because the relationship is not linear, there are outliers, the data is bi-modal, etc.
There's a lot more to this stuff than running CORREL() in Excel or Libre (but not if you simply need something to blog about of course).
People that are critical about their entertainment or have a broader taste simply don't go to the cinema. I personally would never go, family and friends that kind of want to relive their childhood with all of the last few years' remakes, still go.
Especially on MetaCritic you can find the difference between general population and review critics. What critics find good, the general population doesn't and vice versa.
Personally, I don't find most critics very useful because they often do not understand the subtleties behind things like Kingsman or they are pushing the stuff from major studios (most of the recent Bay movies or comic book adaptations get amazing reviews from critics).
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Theater? DVD? Download?
Think of theater viewers as the beta testers. After it's released on DVD/download, those are the real world users who are more likely to make negative opinions heard.
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Not that I disagree with the findings (don't care either way)...
But, that's a ridiculously tiny sample size.
Let's test it over 15,000 movies.
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Because I've more-or-less given up on the ability of the mainstream movie industry to make movies that are actually great anyway.
Amazing trailers and ads = High expectations
High expectations = lots of sales
When your movie ends up sucking = lots of people with bad reviews
Similar thoughts when you reverse it.
Seems legit.
For decades, I have seen how the movies that have critics excited either bore me to tears, or disgust me. I can see when something is well done from a production standpoint, but the stories in movies that critics love are the movies that I HATE. I remember when "Driving Mrs. Daisy" had critics saying how wonderful a movie it was....and yet, everyone I have ever talked to hated that movie. From decade to decade, you get years where this movie or that movie has the critics going wild and praising them, and every time, I find I hate those movies.
Just because something is good from an artistic perspective does not mean the subject matter will appeal to audiences. There are times when movies make a statement about social injustice for this or that group, but it doesn't mean that the movie does more than just speak out about the issues. If it is about gay rights, women, African-American issues, or whatever the statement is, no matter that I may agree with the message of rights for EVERYONE, it doesn't mean I, or many people, will really feel it is a movie to be watched multiple times. Until critics can think like normal people who are more interested in "is the story INTERESTING", outside of some message that the writer/producers/directors want to tell to the world, we will find the opinions of critics are worthless.
Alternative interpretation: People will eat shit when shit is the only thing available to eat. People will still spend money on a mediocre film if there is nothing else to watch. This is why all the foreign films and artsy stuff steers clear of summer releases... otherwise they'd get trounced by DC, Marvel, et al. I'm pretty confident that if you control for the season of the release date, and the other films you compete with on release, you'd find the correlation you are looking for.
I'll watch foreign films and artsy stuff over DC or Marvel films any day.
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First off how "good" (putting aside "ratings" for a second) a movie is has only a limited baring on how "successful" (i.e. box office earnings) a movie is.
A more likely correlation would be how much money was spent on promotion, how wide the actual release was, how many theaters it is showing in, how broad the audience is (not only in ratings such as "R", but also in content).
Ratings, word of mouth, negative press may either impact A) someones decision to not see something they had intended to see, or B) someones decision to see something they had not intended to see.
Indeed ratings can get difficult to compare apples to apples when either the numbers of contributors are really high, or really low. Generally speaking there are likely a lot of small independent films that critics might love (yet have few reviews both in critics and viewers), yet it isn't going to do the same as a big blockbuster that happened to be terrible.
There a a lot of movies, particularly aimed at younger audiences when they are going to go see no matter what the reviews were like.
Anyway I am sure it has some impact, but bottom line the box office earnings are a bit more complicated than how it was reviewed.
My most recent example, is I wanted to go see The Dark Tower as I saw the promotions, and I've read some of the books, however I saw how poorly it did on RT, but also saw how well Logan Lucky did, and without knowing much about it decided to go to that instead (and it was good).
I'd also be very careful/critical about how accurate those box office numbers actually are, as Hollywood doesn't exactly have a pristine record when it comes to fiscal honesty, considering they have their own word attributed to their "accounting" practices.
Intelligent and thoughtful films? For boomers?
If you're right and boomers make up the majority of people watching movies, my money would be on Michael Bay.
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Everyone is his own critic now. With previews, "leaked" trailers and whatnot, and on top of that a load of YouTubers who make movie critics in between their other stuff, who gives a shit about "professional" critics anymore? If anything, they're seen as paid shills that will like whatever movie has the biggest marketing budget to pay them off.
Also "good" movies are not necessarily what will be a box office hit. What is a good movie? Well, take, say, 6th sense. Was a great movie. Great actors. Great acting. And a really awesome surprise at the end. But are you going to buy a second ticket to see it again? Hell no. You already know the plot twist and seeing it again... well, no.
Now compare to Transformers... hell, any of them. All of them combined don't make enough of a script to last one single cartoon TV show of the series, the acting is rotten, the dialogue is ... umm... there is dialogue? Oh, you mean the quiet part between the explosions with the noise that sounds like humans. Yeah, maybe. But the FX! Wow! Blows your mind! Let's go see it right again, and you gotta see it on the big screen, it just ain't the same at home on TV.
And this is why critics' opinion is worth jack shit when it comes to box office revenue. There are awesome movies out there, but many of them are just as awesome at home on TV.
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As the old saying goes, "There's no accounting for taste." Crap movies often do really well at the box office, but then that's just my opinion.
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Maybe I'm not looking at this the right way, but isn't the fact that a website is having anywhere from a 7% to 12% correlation with box office numbers kind of significant?
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The fact that box office returns don't correlate with the actual quality of films (assuming there is a correlation between that and critic reviews in the first place, which I believe there is), is a BAD thing. It just means that the army of marketing assholes from the motion picture industry is succeeding in their mission to trick us and push their shoddy products down our throat. Great news for the studios, of course. Bad news for the rest of us, indicating that we're just going to continue seeing mostly garbage coming out of Hollywood.
Assuming that most of the Rotten Tomato users aren't reviewing a pirated copy of a movie, one review, good or bad, equals one ticket sold. Unless the movie was so bad that you demanded your money back from the theatre, but it seems a little disingenuous to review a movie that you didn't even watch all of ;)
So the conclusion is that box office gross is not caused by RT scores despite the correlation.
In this climate, even bad movies generate doh.
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People will still spend money on a mediocre film if there is nothing else to watch
But there is a LOT of good stuff to watch. Maybe more now than at any point in our history. So people don't need to go out to the movie theaters, not when the best writers have switched to writing for TV series.
The opening week determines the excitement that moviegoers have about the film BEFORE they see it. Not what artistic or even entertainment value the film may have after further reflection. The whole thing where the media announces some record sales is carefully controlled PR as well, and really only has a very short term impact on public perception of a film.
That said, reviews by non-professional critics tend to follow immediate trends and it becomes a popularity contest. A lot of people like what other people seem to like, if only briefly. These sorts of reviews are basically garbage and obtaining a high signal-to-noise ratio is a requirement for review aggregation like Rotten Tomatoes to provide any value to visitors. Executed poorly, reviews become a popularity contest equivalent to the worst high school mock election and reveal more information about the reviewers than about the material they review.
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So there may not be a correlation between "Box Office Mojo numbers" and "critic and audience score", but how does the spent marketing budget play into this? I assume if you plaster a city with movie ads, more people will go and watch. So if you want high box office numbers, you can buy them with advertising.
But I still prefer them over IMDB scores, which have been flooded with the lowest common denominator children / tweens and adhd style people who just think anything that's "ok" must be "uhhh I dunno? 9 or 10 I guess? it was ok!?"
Nope.
RT seems to more match my style, if a film is a 7.5 on IMDB and at least a 6.5 on RT, you can /probably/ rest assured, if it's a genre you enjoy, it's going to be an ok watch.