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Brett Ratner claims Rotten Tomatoes is "the worst thing in movie culture" (poor BvS)

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N

Ninjimbo

Member
Gordon Shumway said:
Dude..up until last week, BvS had broken the March box office record held since 2012. The movie made fucking bank. It's rep is based on the majority of folks not digging it as much as you do, not Rotten Tomatoes. I literally know one person in my life that even pays attention to RT..and they hit the theater every Friday anyway.

We need to stop calling people stupid lazy idiots because they don't like what we like..that shit is WAY more played out than shitting on your boy Ratner.
Click to expand...
If people don't give a shit about RT, then why is it being plastered in ads for movies like Arrival and Life? Why are radio shows/podcasts leading discussions on movies about it? Why were the cast and crew of BvS being asked questions about the reviews?

RT matters. This has been a thing for a long time. It's hard to figure out how much it matters to the overall picture because perception varies from person to person. But RT does have an influence. Pretending like it doesn't matter and it doesn't affect perception...I just don't believe that. For movies dating back more than twenty years, those reviews are going to be the only source of information people are going to have when gauging the reception of the movie. What conclusion do you think they'll arrive to? The same thing is happening now with word of mouth. Sites like RT and Metacritic only help facilitate that.

Also I didn't call anyone an idiot. You can be smart as a whip and still be lazy. And I like Jeremy Jahns!
 
B

Bobby Roberts

Banned
cDNA said:
Well , Is there a 538 like site for movies reviews with different statistical analysis?
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RT is as close as you get. You can break it down to overall rating, top critics rating, average score within both overall and top critics, average score vs. viewer score, and that's before you get into the comparisons within genre/series.

So far as I can tell, it's not really that easy to do anything as comparable with Metacritic.

The problem is that with both Metacritic and RT, people just look for the number to the left of the percent sign, and that's it. And that's a thing the industry has been complicit in promoting because it makes things way more simplified. You can just slap a number on a box cover and you're good. Free marketing, basically. Same w/ box-office numbers.

The problem is that Rotten Tomatoes isn't really a site to determine if a movie is good or not, although it's that: It should be a site for readers to determine which critics to pay attention to.

But nobody wants to fuckin' read, so it doesn't get used that way.
 
K

Kinitari

Black Canada Mafia
I think there is a weird bit of elitism when it comes to the amount of effort people are expecting from the average person.

"Why use something like metacritic? It isn't always right, sometimes those movies that are rated low are objectively just better than the 'popular' movies with their 90s scores! Just do what I do, dedicate a portion of your day reading up on a variety of review sites, find someone who has historically agreed with you a good amount of the time, and use that plus research about the product to decide whether or not you want to spend your money!"
 
Subpar Spatula

Subpar Spatula

Banned
I haven't used RT in a long time. You eventually realize the reviews are super shallow and littered with metaphors, similes, and generic, "the tone is all over the place like a wack-a-mole game". Ionno for some reason I can't take a critic seriously anymore if all they do is produce 3 paragraphs without breaking down what actually occurred. RT approved critics need to step up their game.
 
B

Bobby Roberts

Banned
Kinitari said:
I think there is a weird bit of elitism when it comes to the amount of effort people are expecting from the average person.
Click to expand...

I don't know if it's really elitism to expect people to read.

It's not that time-consuming a process, reading.

Especially if you're the sort of person who habitually visits forums/messageboards.
 
C

caliph95

Member
Kinitari said:
I think there is a weird bit of elitism when it comes to the amount of effort people are expecting from the average person.

"Why use something like metacritic? It isn't always right, sometimes those movies that are rated low are objectively just better than the 'popular' movies with their 90s scores! Just do what I do, dedicate a portion of your day reading up on a variety of review sites, find someone who has historically agreed with you a good amount of the time, and use that plus research about the product to decide whether or not you want to spend your money!"
Click to expand...
Most people probably don't pay much attention to it anyway would more likely watch a trailer laugh, see some action or actors and maybe directors they liked are attached. Then go buy a ticket promotion and marketing is more important than reviews though they can be part of the promotion,
 
C

caliph95

Member
Bobby Roberts said:
I don't know if it's really elitism to expect people to read.

It's not that time-consuming a process, reading.

Especially if you're the sort of person who habitually visits forums/messageboards.
Click to expand...
How many people spend time on forums and message boards though at least regularly
 
K

kswiston

Member
Bobby Roberts said:
I used to make this argument as well but as time's gone on I've found this probably isn't the case. K-Swiss was making a really good argument against it somewhere on the board today, but basically: RT at least just presents right up front what people said, the numbers attached to that, and lets you get as granular as you need to with those numbers.

Metacritic applies weight to different outlets, doesn't tell you how they apply that weight, and apparently doesn't weight things the same at all times?
Click to expand...

Yes, the thread on reviews for the upcoming film Life was a good example.

People rightly pointed out that 100% on RT after 6-7 reviews (or whatever the number was at the time) didn't really mean that much. However, we had a bunch of posters jumping on board the Metacritic score of 56 instead, without really looking at anything other than lower score = more likely correct. In the end, the Life scores on both sites were around the same (currently 55 on Metacritic and 6/10 avg on RT), but that's not really the point.

Metacritic's 56 was based on 4 reviews. The review scores listed were 50, 50, 70, 75. I believe that one of the 50s was from Hollywood Reporter, the other 50 was from IndieWire, the 70 was from Variety, and the 75 was from The Playlist. The Variety and Hollywood Reporter reviews did not have scores, so I am not sure how Metacritic decided on those values.

If Metacritic was using an unweighted average, the score should have been 61 at that point. To get a 56 with those 4 scores, the 50 reviews had to have a weighting that was at least double that of the 70s scores on average. You can guess which of those venues was so much more trustworthy than the others according to Metacritic.


Rotten Tomatoes lets critics decide if they want to assign a rotten or fresh in borderline cases where that is not clear, or for reviews with no score. They provide you with a percentage of critics who gave "fresh" reviews, and provide an arithmetic mean to the reviews that have scores/grades. They do not try to assign their own scoring to reviews that don't provide ratings. They also tend to link about 5x as many reviews as Metacritic. For those who do think that gafpostersmoviereviews.com should not have the same weighting as The New York Times, they have the Top Critics section.

The only issue with Rotten Tomatoes is that people use the percentages in isolation, without considering a film's genre, average reviews, etc. That's not really the website's fault. They push their tomatometer, but that's their gimmick, and they are up front about the fact that a 90% =/= 9/10 film.
 
N

Nepenthe

Member
I'm sorry, but if only 23% of a hundred and so critics paid to analyze film actually liked yours, you can't wiggle out of that with a debate about the nature of how to properly use aggregate sites. Your film just sucks. It's not inherently an insult to all of the employees' individual work either to say this, but rather an insult to the aggregate sum. A shitty film can still have good CGI or acting.

More in general though, I don't get people who admonish those who use these sites to get a quick overview of how films are faring, but then turn around and say they get their film recommendations from friends. Unless you have exactly the same tastes as your friends, you're still using an outside opinion to influence your watching decisions. So what if critics are "strangers?" They're strangers whose job is to watch more shit on average than you probably do. I dunno; feels like some Trumpian "fuck the elites" stuff whenever I hear people say "I don't let anyone tell me what to watch."
 
B

Bobby Roberts

Banned
Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku! said:
What about the hypothetical middle america family brett ratner is talking about?
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Well, they're not in here suggesting that being asked to read a thing is inherently elitist to some degree.

And so far as Ratner's words go, I'm not inclined to believe Ratner's got a real firm grasp on any Middle America, hypothetical or not.

caliph95 said:
How many people spend time on forums and message boards though at least regularly
Click to expand...

well, if you wanna consider reddit, twitter, and facebook threads a version of forum/messageboard discussion: A fuckin' lot.

Even if you wanna subtract those three - still a decent-ish amount. Not a majority of internet users, of course, but a goodish number of people. And considering we are having this conversation on a forum, I guess the question is that are we now classifying ourselves as elitist simply by being here? And what does that do for an anti-elitist argument being made on a medium that now has to be considered an inherently elitist one?
 
L

LionPride

Banned
The only people who care about Rotten Tomatoes really are people on the internet who use it to validate their argument and then say it's terrible when it has a low percentage on a movie they love
 
B

Bobby Roberts

Banned
kswiston said:
Yes, the thread on reviews for the upcoming film Life was a good example.

People rightly pointed out that 100% on RT after 6-7 reviews (or whatever the number was at the time) didn't really mean that much. However, we had a bunch of posters jumping on board the Metacritic score of 56 instead, without really looking at anything other than lower score = more likely correct. In the end, the Life scores on both sites were around the same (currently 55 on Metacritic and 6/10 avg on RT), but that's not really the point.

Metacritic's 56 was based on 4 reviews. The review scores listed were 50, 50, 70, 75. I believe that one of the 50s was from Hollywood Reporter, the other 50 was from IndieWire, the 70 was from Variety, and the 75 was from The Playlist. The Variety and Hollywood Reporter reviews did not have scores, so I am not sure how Metacritic decided on those values.

If Metacritic was using an unweighted average, the score should have been 61 at that point. To get a 56 with those 4 scores, the 50 reviews had to have a weighting that was at least double that of the 70s scores on average. You can guess which of those venues was so much more trustworthy than the others according to Metacritic.


Rotten Tomatoes lets critics decide if they want to assign a rotten or fresh in borderline cases where that is not clear, or for reviews with no score. They provide you with a percentage of critics who gave "fresh" reviews, and provide an arithmetic mean to the reviews that have scores/grades. They do not try to assign their own scoring to reviews that don't provide ratings. They also tend to link about 5x as many reviews as Metacritic. For those who do think that gafpostersmoviereviews.com should not have the same weighting as The New York Times, they have the Top Critics section.

The only issue with Rotten Tomatoes is that people use the percentages in isolation, without considering a film's genre, average reviews, etc. That's not really the website's fault. They push their tomatometer, but that's their gimmick, and they are up front about the fact that a 90% =/= 9/10 film.
Click to expand...

To K-Swiss you listen
 
G

Gordon Shumway

Banned
Ninjimbo said:
If people don't give a shit about RT, then why is it being plastered in ads for movies like Arrival and Life? Why are radio shows/podcasts leading discussions on movies about it? Why were the cast and crew of BvS being asked questions about the reviews?

RT matters. This has been a thing for a long time. It's hard to figure out how much it matters to the overall picture because perception varies from person to person. But RT does have an influence. Pretending like it doesn't matter and it doesn't affect perception...I just don't believe that. For movies dating back more than twenty years, those reviews are going to be the only source of information people are going to have when gauging the reception of the movie. What conclusion do you think they'll arrive to? The same thing is happening now with word of mouth. Sites like RT and Metacritic only help facilitate that.

Also I didn't call anyone an idiot. You can be smart as a whip and still be lazy. And I like Jeremy Jahns!
Click to expand...

Yet Thor 2, Ant-Man, and the rest didn't make as much as BvS. What happened there? RT isn't doing its job? End of the day, folks are going to watch what they want and take varying opinions on a case by case basis. Opinion on BvS was it was a mess, and it STILL managed to break records and make bank.

Money talks. Transformers money proves that RT scores ain't shit..

The Artisan said:
this almost sounds like how Trump or Trump camp said any negative news/polls are fake news/polls.
Click to expand...

People literally say that shit seriously about these movie review scores. Embarrassing..
 
D

Diprosalic

Banned
So what harm did RT cause?
I only see the positive effect of people checking out good movies because they scored high but still go to movies that scored lower but had decent marketing and or trailers.
 
R

rjc571

Banned
If there's even a 1 percent chance that Rotten Tomatoes is our enemy, we must treat it as an absolute certainty.
 
K

kswiston

Member
Gordon Shumway said:
Yet Thor 2, Ant-Man, and the rest didn't make as much as BvS. What happened there? RT isn't doing its job? End of the day, folks are going to watch what they want and take varying opinions on a case by case basis. Opinion on BvS was it was a mess, and it STILL managed to break records and make bank.

Money talks. Transformers money proves that RT scores ain't shit..

People literally say that shit seriously about these movie review scores. Embarrassing..
Click to expand...


Thor 2 had mediocre reviews, so that's an odd pick. 66% and a 6.2/10 average is not exactly a ringing endorsement. The review average was the exact same as Man of Steel's. It just had a few more "meh, I guess it was OK" reviews and a few less "eh, I didn't really like it" reviews than Man of Steel.

Ant-Man did better than expected. BvS did worse than expected. Transformers has been shedding business outside of Asia since the second film. The Last Knight is expected to continue that trend.

You obviously have to take a franchise's popularity into consideration, and franchise/marketing > reviews across properties, but poor reviews tend to correlate pretty strongly with poor WOM and declining franchise interest if those reviews continue to be poor.
 
Ascenion

Ascenion

Member
Isn't Rotten Tomatoes less an metric of quality and more a metric of basic positive vs negative? If the latter is true that score is on point and you shouldn't be using it to judge quality anyway.
 
S

SuperRaddy

Member
I knew the RT score and decided to give it a chance, then watched the extended version....

Those are hours i won't ever get back in my life..

Same goes for Suicide Squad.

fucking terrible movies.
 
B

BKatastrophe

Member
I mean I'm not gonna shit talk Ratner completely. I did enjoy Hercules. And X-Men 3: The Last Stand. Yup. I enjoyed that too. And Rush Hour and Rush Hour 2.
Bobby Roberts said:
I don't even know what "review culture" means, really.
Click to expand...

I honestly don't know what most "__________ culture" mean 90% of the time.
 
K

Kaizer

Banned
overcast said:
He's right in a way. The lengths to which people use Rottentomatoes as gospel is not healthy. Some of the best movies of the year end up in that 70% range.
Click to expand...

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but isn't 70% a really good score? At least that's the way I've always interpreted Rotten Tomatoes score percentages. The way I've understood it is that anything above 60% is eyed as pretty favorable in a majority of reviews & most likely a "good" film or worth a watch. Films below 60% are a lot more divisive but not necessarily bad.
 
T

Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku!

Member
tomtom94 said:
Fun fact: Brett Ratner's highest RT percentage is 69%.
Click to expand...

Hey thats 42 points higher than BvS at least

Kaizer said:
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but isn't 70% a really good score? At least that's the way I've always interpreted Rotten Tomatoes score percentages. The way I've understood it is that anything above 60% is eyed as pretty favorable in a majority of reviews & most likely a "good" film or worth a watch. Films below 60% are a lot more divisive but not necessarily bad.
Click to expand...

That's the way it's supposed to be but most people think anything under 80s is bad.
 
S

Spinluck

Member
BadAss2961 said:
You know. Everyone on GAF should know.

The anticipation, the amount of replies, and the aftermath of review threads for big games and movies should tell you all you need to know about review culture. Some people seem to live for those moments more than the products themselves.
Click to expand...

Yup, we are very much an embodiment of it at times.

Sometimes looking at it from the outside will show you that it isn't always about the product in question.
 
P

Phrozenflame500

Member
Nope, sorry BvS still sucks.

RT's problem is that it scores "safe" movies really high since it's a binary good/bad while more offbeat movies or movies in more niche genres might get a mediocre score. But when a movie scores really low I find more often or not it tends to deserve it.
 
G

Gordon Shumway

Banned
kswiston said:
Thor 2 had mediocre reviews, so that's an odd pick. 66% and a 6.2/10 average is not exactly a ringing endorsement. The review average was the exact same as Man of Steel's. It just had a few more "meh, I guess it was OK" reviews and a few less "eh, I didn't really like it" reviews than Man of Steel.

Ant-Man did better than expected. BvS did worse than expected. Transformers has been shedding business outside of Asia since the second film. The Last Knight is expected to continue that trend.

You obviously have to take a franchise's popularity into consideration, and franchise/marketing > reviews across properties, but poor reviews tend to correlate pretty strongly with poor WOM and declining franchise interest if those reviews continue to be poor.
Click to expand...

Which is all I'm saying. Thor scored low, but not freaking BvS low..made nothing near. Ant-Man did fantastic for what it is, but it isn't gonna complete with The Bat and friends. Their higher RT scores didn't help them break records. For as much as folks hate that 27% number, it really didn't stop people from spending their dollars..which is what counts here, right?

As Slayven stated earlier, I believe word of mouth does much more to help/damage than random strangers/sites on the internet. When a movie is great, you're gonna know it just from how much people are talking about it. I saw Get Out, which I wasn't planning to, because people who I would have never expect were asking if I had seen it and how good it was.

I'll go ahead and say OK, there MUST be some people out there that base their viewing habits on reviews..I just think you guys are a bit off on just how much those % influence the average movie goer as opposed to friends, co-workers and family.
 
E

EGM1966

Member
Personally I think directors like Ratner and Snyder have done more damage than rotten tomatoes with their mass market mediocrity.

That said I agree that the idea of literally scoring media as if it's maths homework has to go.

The idea you can take something like 2001 or Lawrence of Arabia and go "5/10 see me later as you've made it far too obtuse" is just ridiculous. Same goes for Batman vs Superman or Suicide Squad for that matter.

People need to fucking read more than a score again and form their own view from the options expressed in the review.

And before someone else does it I'll rate this post "6/10 don't be so elitist I liked Rush Hour".
 
Liamario

Liamario

Banned
Surely the financial success of BVS suggests that the RT score had little impact.
Also, is he suggesting people should go see bad movies without looking at reviews, just so he can line his pockets a bit more...
 
C

cartographer

Member
I find Rotten Tomatoes incredibly helpful for what they actually provide: a simple percentage of favorable reviews non-favorable. I think that particular metric can be interesting and useful. They provide a lot of other information, as well, but that is their main feature.

The claim of nobody being able to figure out what that number means is bullshit. It's clearly explained on the page for the movie and accompanied by other metrics to give you a fuller picture.

BvS wouldn't be appreciably more beloved if it had a higher Tomatometer score. It would have a higher Tomatometer score if it was appreciably more beloved.

The financial side matters, too, but nothing about RT implies that only RT matters. The two can coexist.
 
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