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 Rotten Tomatoes and the likes get bad press on Cinema Discusso. If I'm in the mood for going to the cinema but not sure what to see; I'll use RT to influence my choice. I don't think I'm alone in doing this kind of thing. Now that Rotten Tomato "Top Critics" mostly say Suicide Squad sucks, fans have lashed out. I think a discussion about it's value to film audiences or the art of review would be valuable. Here are the big 3 sites for movies: Rotten Tomatoes - Owner: Time Warner/Warner Bros. (30%), Comcast/NBCUniversal (70%)  https://www.rottentomatoes.com/ How Rotten Tomatoes Scores  Metacritic - Owner: CBS Interactive (CBS Corporation)  http://www.metacritic.com/ How Metacritic Scores  and also IMDB, I guess: Internet Movie Data-Base - Owner: Amazon More like a user ratings aggregator but who cares Are Aggregators bad for small movies that don't get a wide release? Is defiance of RT scores the best way to break into CD?
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Aug 3, 2016 16:44
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Isn't the biggest problem with RT is that it only takes into account whether a film was above or below that magical 59%? A film could be extremely mediocre but if eighty out of one hundred critics gave it 61% it would be considered 80% fresh? Also the fact that movie sites seem to do the thing game magazines were notorious for where 7 is considered average and anything below that is bad. I remember EDGE magazine used a 'true' 1-10 scale where 5 was the average and 7 would be considered 'good' and people poo poo on it all the time because fans of things don't like seeing those things get low scores. Add in the fact that superhero movies are incredibly tribal and yeah I'm not surprised it was Suicide Squad that was the final straw in this argument.
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Aug 3, 2016 17:04
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I honestly find the pull-quotes that Rotten Tomatoes use to be extremely helpful. Combined with the score I can normally make a pretty accurate guess at whether or not I'd enjoy something. For example with The Neon Demon, which has a 51% on RT, you take a look at the quotes from the negative reviews and they're all stuff like "Pretentious and self-indulgent, it seems tailor-made to appeal to lovers of the obtuse and inscrutable until it takes a left-turn into schlocky, gore-drenched splatter imagery" and I know that I'm most likely going to fall into the "love it" side of "hate it or love it".
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Aug 3, 2016 17:10
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trip9 posted:I honestly find the pull-quotes that Rotten Tomatoes use to be extremely helpful. Combined with the score I can normally make a pretty accurate guess at whether or not I'd enjoy something. For example with The Neon Demon, which has a 51% on RT, you take a look at the quotes from the negative reviews and they're all stuff like "Pretentious and self-indulgent, it seems tailor-made to appeal to lovers of the obtuse and inscrutable until it takes a left-turn into schlocky, gore-drenched splatter imagery" and I know that I'm most likely going to fall into the "love it" side of "hate it or love it". Yea I agree with this, the usefulness of Rotten Tomatoes is more in the convenience of being able to see a whole bunch of specific comments about a movie without having to go to a bunch of different review sites. Scores are meaningless, but if a reviewer says certain magic words, I know I'm likely to enjoy the movie.
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Aug 3, 2016 17:14
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The big difference between Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic is that Rotten Tomatoes is a measure of critical consensus and Metacritic measures... well... a lot of numbers they made up on their own and then averaged.
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Aug 3, 2016 17:41
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I understand doing a cursory glance at RT if you want to see a movie. I do it from time to time too. But the important part of these sites is actually reading the reviews, and that is where people have issue. 90% of the reviews on RT are from garbage clickbait websites nowadays, and are written like poo poo. They don't explain well why they so vehemently hate a movie or why they like it, they just want snappy one-liners for pullquotes.
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Aug 3, 2016 18:41
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Bedshaped posted:Rotten Tomatoes - Owner: Time Warner/Warner Bros. (30%), Comcast/NBCUniversal (70%) Wait a second... Suicide Squad currently has about a 30% on Rotten Tomatoes. The fix is in!  Rotten Tomatoes scores are just a tool for people with limited time to try and make the correct choice with their movie-viewing dollars and hours. For those people that view a lot of movies and understand how their personal tastes differ from both the mainstream and certain critics they follow, they have no need of it because they clearly have invested the time to get a better sense of it, or perhaps just invested more time and money such that single failures matter less. It's just a digest for people who aren't quite as into movies as the average CinemaDenizen. It's certainly flawed, but it services a need.
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Aug 3, 2016 19:05
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GonSmithe posted:I understand doing a cursory glance at RT if you want to see a movie. I do it from time to time too. But the important part of these sites is actually reading the reviews, and that is where people have issue. 90% of the reviews on RT are from garbage clickbait websites nowadays, and are written like poo poo. They don't explain well why they so vehemently hate a movie or why they like it, they just want snappy one-liners for pullquotes. That's why they have a Top Critics section, I guess.
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Aug 4, 2016 13:36
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Bedshaped posted:Is defiance of RT scores the best way to break into CD? This forum's reflexive dislike of RT mostly stems from a time when well-reasoned arguments for why a film is good/bad were met with posts that essentially amounted to "the RT score disagrees with you, so you're wrong", which isn't very conductive to a good discussion for obvious reasons. If you want to use aggregator sites to determine whether a film is worth watching or to gauge the general reaction to a release, then by all means, but they're not a particularly worthwhile debate subject unless you're interested in the economic perspective on film-making.
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Aug 4, 2016 14:27
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My issue with RT is that a film could be simply slightly underwhelming for everyone who reviewed it and it would still get a 0%. Or a film could be just above average for everyone and get 100%. It's no indication of whether a movie is actually good, but people treat it like it's the hallmark of quality. It needs to not be a binary system and have a middle ground. IMDB ratings are fan votes, so they're relatively worthless. I remember when people were downvoting movies in the Top 250 just so they could make The Dark Knight reach #1. It's still in the #4 slot.
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Aug 5, 2016 00:04
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Samuel Clemens posted:unless you're interested in the economic perspective on film-making. How's that go? Are some contract bonuses tied to rotten tomato score, like some video game salaries are based on metacritic scores? It's a terrible practice.
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Aug 5, 2016 00:57
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Aggregators make finding reviews from writers who generally share my tastes really easy and that's probably their only useful aspect for me. Occasionally I'll read some of the most negative reviews to get an idea of what shortcomings to expect going in, but given the state of criticism today, doing that is only worth it about half the time. There's a cluster of critics who really get off on giving very negative reviews to movies that are even a hair outside the cultural mainstream.
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Aug 5, 2016 01:47
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I always thought it'd be interesting to see a historically accurate version of these, like only reviews from the time of release. That way you'd see like The Thing certified rotten or w/e
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Aug 5, 2016 03:49
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Pierson posted:Also the fact that movie sites seem to do the thing game magazines were notorious for where 7 is considered average and anything below that is bad. I remember EDGE magazine used a 'true' 1-10 scale where 5 was the average and 7 would be considered 'good' and people poo poo on it all the time because fans of things don't like seeing those things get low scores. Add in the fact that superhero movies are incredibly tribal and yeah I'm not surprised it was Suicide Squad that was the final straw in this argument. We live in a world where there is more high-quality media out there than you could consume in ten lifetimes, even if you subscribe to the idea that a 5 out of 10 is average and a 7 out of 10 is above average why would you waste time on something that is merely above average when there's so much actual good and great stuff out there?
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Aug 5, 2016 06:46
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Guy Mann posted:We live in a world where there is more high-quality media out there than you could consume in ten lifetimes, even if you subscribe to the idea that a 5 out of 10 is average and a 7 out of 10 is above average why would you waste time on something that is merely above average when there's so much actual good and great stuff out there? Generally, because what an individual considers actual good and great and what the aggregate considers good and great will eventually divulge. Any person will find highly rated media they dislike and (should they be willing to risk watching it) low rated media they think is excellent. Unless your in the curious position of having no personal taste, sticking to what aggregate sites consider good or great is needlessly limiting your enjoyment.
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Aug 5, 2016 07:39
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Some thoughts about Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic 1. Review aggregators are clear about what they represent: a survey of critical reviews. Some folks get mad at them because they don't accurately measure film quality. But the sites aren't pretending to measure that. And come on, what is film quality? A hundred years of cinema and we can't agree on an answer; don't hate two websites for coming up with one. 2. The classic Tomatometer does measure just the proportion of reviews that are "positive." But look below it and the site does provide an average rating too (i.e. the mean of every review score):  Though I'll say it's not obvious how they translate, say, a B+ to a scale of 100, but I doubt it's that big a deal in practice. 3. Both sites provide avenues for clarifications. RT allows reviewers to write in and say that their 60% review was actually meant to be negative. MC allows reviewers to clarify that their B- actually translates as a 50% score. So it's at least safe to say the reviews being aggregated are represented correctly in the final formula. 4. RT and MC collect reviews in very different ways. RT includes far more publications and reviewers from all kinds of sources; sites included for Suicide Squad's reviews include Beliefnet, One Guy's Opinion, Legion of Leia, Birth.Movies.Death, and The Blu Spot. They do document their approval criteria for critics and publications extensively, but suffice to say the result includes a lot of random rear end sites. They even include video reviews. MC prides itself on curating an exclusive list of publications. Their list of approved publications is far shorter and tends to represent the biggest names in movie reviews. They do a quality vs quantity jab at RT in their FAQ page. 5. They also compute their "average rating" in different ways. RT's average rating, as depicted in point 2, is a pretty traditional code:6. Both sides also aggregate audience reviews, which is more interesting than you'd think. Movies like Spring Breakers, Hail, Caesar!, and The Witch where there's a clear mismatch of marketing and actual content often receive audience scores far lower than the critic score. In general, it's just useful to see if audiences love a film as much as critics -- it often says a lot about the film. 7. People also get mad at review aggregators, I think, because they try to put a number on art. It's popular to think that art is sacrosanct, something worthy of sacrifice and impossible to measure. They're fighting modernity on this one.
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Aug 5, 2016 10:50
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effectual posted:How's that go? Are some contract bonuses tied to rotten tomato score, like some video game salaries are based on metacritic scores? It's a terrible practice. I don't know about that, but I doubt it. I was thinking more about the potential relationship between aggregated score and box office earnings, i.e. do positive reviews actually contribute to a film's commercial success?
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Aug 5, 2016 10:58
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My main issue with aggregators is that they do not provide the ability to disaggregate their scores by the crosstabs of the score providers. As in, take the case of when Ghostbusters score was brought down because of MRAs flooding it with 0 ratings. Ideally, I would like to be able to see what the non-18-29-male demographics had to say about the film, even if these people are the majority of grading providers. Not to mention, female - targeted movies also get worse scores from male reviewers (not just the ignorant/biased audience). Subconscious bias at play, probably. And... I do realise that, in the age of personalised ratings, all I have to do is to teach the appropriate algorithm what I like and it should recommend me similar movies, but I value privacy. So, I'd very much prefer the crosstabs.
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Aug 5, 2016 17:01
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Vegetable posted:Though I'll say it's not obvious how they translate, say, a B+ to a scale of 100, but I doubt it's that big a deal in practice. I would assume the same way it traditionally translates
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Aug 5, 2016 18:56
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meristem posted:My main issue with aggregators is that they do not provide the ability to disaggregate their scores by the crosstabs of the score providers. As in, take the case of when Ghostbusters score was brought down because of MRAs flooding it with 0 ratings. Ideally, I would like to be able to see what the non-18-29-male demographics had to say about the film, even if these people are the majority of grading providers. Not to mention, female - targeted movies also get worse scores from male reviewers (not just the ignorant/biased audience). Subconscious bias at play, probably. IMDb has this.
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Aug 21, 2016 04:32
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and it produces the results you'd expect!: Ghostbusters 2016
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Aug 21, 2016 04:41
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Escobarbarian posted:That's why they have a Top Critics section, I guess. Yeah, the only thing I really use RT for is because it's a good place to read reviews, I basically just click on Top Critics and look at some that are at the top and bottom of the score range to get a feel if I really don't know if I'm going to like a movie, but I'm a pretty good judge of whether or not I'm gonna like a movie at this point. I mean, most of the time RT is generally spot on with the really good and really bad movies, but there are enough instance when it doesn't apply that I know to read the reviews.
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Aug 21, 2016 06:32
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