I find RT scores very accurate but not the raw score.
What I mean is that a 70% score is meaningless to me. I need to know the movie genre, the audience score, the age of the movie and then I basically do a “lookup table” in my head. And I have that lookup table because I’ve looked up every movie I’ve watched on RT for 15 years so I know how the scores correlate to my own personal opinions.
As an example: the author said that critic scores should align with audience scores but no that’s not true at all. Critics tend to care more about plot continuity, plot depth and details while the audience tends to care about enjoyability. Both are important to me so I always look at both scores. That’s why a lot of very funny comedies have a 60-69% critic score but a 90%-100% audience score — because it’s hilarious but the plot makes no fucking sense and has a million holes. And if you see a comedy with 95% critic but 70% audience, it will be thought-provoking and well done but don’t expect more than occasional chuckles.
Plex shows you both critic and audience scores from RT (IMDB also) and they indeed diverge consistently on the lines you suggest. In general I trust the audience scores a lot more because I'm trying to have fun watching movies rather than analyze their plot/pacing/cinematography/etc.
The audience can be trusted to know how to have fun. The discrepancy between critic and audience scores is also a valuable signal to judge how fun campy/schlocky/B-movie horror films particularly from the 80s and 90s.
In Rotten Tomatoes there's always That Guy who's being contrary for the sake of being different.
Like Paddington and Paddington 2 had 100% review scores for a long time, until some "reviewers" disliked it on purpose bringing Paddington 2 to 99%
Using multiple sites as an aggregate works. In IMDB you need to check the vote distribution graph and in your mind take out all the 1's and 10's and see where the average/median lies after that.
And it's important to find actual reviewers whose taste aligns with yours and use them as more directed guidance.
I often enjoy movies that are unexpected and don't fit neatly into one established genre, but I think these tend to get lower audience ratings, while films that deliver to expectations do better, even if most of a randomly selected audience would dislike them.
If a movie is a comedy, with a poster with big red letters and a white background, people know it's a certain kind of movie, and mostly those who enjoy those movies will go see it.
Likewise with documentaries about some niche interest - those who watch it mostly sought it out because they're into that.
My immediate thought after seeing the first chart was that it is inversely related to my own experience with movies in the last 20 years. Maybe there's an idea in there for a 'score normalizing' browser extension.
One important factor is that the critics score is binary in a sense: if all critics agree that the movie was "passable but not great" then Rotten Tomatoes still gives it a 100% critics score.
The website explains it clearly enough I would say.
I didn't like the idea that my money had paid for such a disservice of my favourite book, so it pushed me to cancel my Prime subscription that had been ongoing for years. I don't buy nearly as much on Amazon these days as a consequence.
I am annoyed by Rings of Power, but at least we got some fairly passable (if still very flawed) adaptations from Peter Jackson. I'm more salty about Wheel of Time, because that trashed the source material just as hard, and because it bombed it's unlikely we will ever see someone try again with an actual good adaptation.
I rarely get angry about bad content but RoP felt like a personal affront. I love Tolkien's world and the people who put RoP together did so with not just ignorance and incompetence, but some kind of malice. They intentionally butchered Tolkien's writing and world. This stands in such stark contrast with Peter Jackson's position that it is not his right to inject his personal values and narcissistic hubris into the movies. He chose to honour the material as best he could while adapting it. It is, without any shadow of a doubt, the better approach.
> This stands in such stark contrast with Peter Jackson's position that it is not his right to inject his personal values and narcissistic hubris into the movies. He chose to honour the material as best he could while adapting it.
That's funny, because that's very much not what happened with those movies. Remember the character assassination of Faramir? I recall Jackson (or perhaps Fran Walsh) saying in an interview that they deliberately broke from Tolkien's story with that one, because the way Tolkien wrote it didn't fit the story they were trying to tell. They felt that having someone set the One Ring aside when tempted undermined the idea of building up the Ring as a threat in the minds of the audience. In other words, they chose to go with the story they wanted to tell rather than honoring the story Tolkien told.
Certainly the LOTR movies weren't as flagrant as Rings of Power with the liberties they took. And some of the changes were indeed due to the constraints of adapting to the medium of film, rather than a book. But even so, they chose to disrespect the source material pretty blatantly at times.
It's fair to point out the difference re Faramir but I feel it is rather small and inconsequential. He ultimately made the same decision in both the book and movie. Again, I am not contending that no changes were made. A movie adaptation requires changes. I'm claiming that the changes were in service to the material, lore, world-buildings, themes, and messaging. The RoP writers thumbed their noses at all of that.
To me that feels like sacrificing a detail to service the larger story, which when you're trying to fit three whole books into just three movies might be necessary. In RoP they made many changes nilly-willy, missing most of what made the source material great.
Critics often score based on first few episodes to be released in, and never revisit the score. And if it's shiny/ expensive (and RoP was both) and seems like it might lead somewhere, they risk ridiculing themselves by being too critical.
Critics have a political agenda, they overrate movies with “a message”, the message being always leaning Californian. The movie industry is a massive sector with lobbies, and paid critics are no stranger to that.
And as the sibling says, audience pays to see a movie. The audience, the people, are more politically balanced. There is no bias or selection: It’s the democratic components, including people that the “in” lobbies don’t like.
And there's no evidence for "the idea". Also the "audience" reviewers are self-selecting, and in my experience tilt towards shallowness and bigotry. My own preferences are generally better aligned with the top critics.
If I weren't already well familiar with the diverse critic reviews on RT, claims that the critics are "woke" (or equivalently, have a "Californian" "political agenda" that "overrates" movies with a message) would be reason for me to value their views over self-selecting "audience" reviews, which I find to be mostly shallow and uninformed, and with a good dose of provincial bigotry as part of the "political balance". I personally am not looking for "political balance", certainly not as that currently manifests itself in the U.S.
And if paid critics are no stranger to lobbies (or the movie industry as a massive sector with lobbies ... it's a bit hard to parse), I see no particular reason to expect them to have a political agenda that overrates movies with a message--I don't think those are the ones that make big bucks for the massive sector. (I'm more interested in indie fare, or at least stuff with more character and depth and less CGI and juvenile superheroes vs. supervillains.) Much more likely is that this spew reflects a political agenda.
I thought "Californian bias" was a great term precisely because it isn't quite the same (or as shallow) as "woke". How could the movie industry not have a Californian bias? So much of it is made in that very peculiar culture, peculiar even by American standards.
And yet if you hated that sort of thing, why (or how?) would you become a movie critic? Can you imagine being a classical music critic and intensely disliking Vienna? (Another damn peculiar, damn influential culture, by the way).
I agree. It is clear and self-evident that movie critics have a California bias. I cite Emilia Perez (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/emilia_perez) with a 71% of critics recommending the movie. This movie won *91 awards* this season. This is, by any objective and subjective metric, an atrocious film. Audiences gave it 17% on Rotten and 5.4 on IMDB. Why did this movie win so many awards and positive reviews from critics? Because it has a trans person as the lead. That's it. The bias is on full display with this movie.
But that is more about "woke" than California. My point was that California is peculiar in far more complicated ways than merely being more trans-positive. Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't seem especially "woke" to me, but he seems very California. Scientology is hardly "woke", but it's very California. Steve Jobs, same. Utterly weird culture, if we hadn't been so extremely exposed to it. We think of so many things as normal, even though they're not normal at all in our actual lives where we are, but they're normal in California. (Well, more normal). That was Vienna too. It goes way beyond a simple culture war dichotomy.
I completely agree. Feels a bit ironic that not only do anti-woke conservatives seem to implicitly believe California = woke, but this unnuanced read is apparently held a plurality of liberals as well.
A California bias is not the same as being woke. 6 time Oscar award winner and 14 time Oscar Nominee film La La Land wasn't especially woke, but it was damn near manufactured in a lab to appeal to the exact sort of sensibilities that are held by Academy members.
The focus on careerism and social climbing, the nostalgia for an era of media since gone by, the melancholic reality of how damn near impossible it is to succeed as an actor or musician, these aren't woke ideas, but they do reflect the general sentimentality of the people in the greater LA area.
Something I thought you might get into would be series, whether movies or TV / sequels. Sometimes they get devoted fans who love the whole series, and those sequels or later season have great scores, but you might not enjoy them whatsoever.
My example would be a TV show, A Discovery of Witches which is overall well-received, but I couldn't enjoy at all. Perhaps if you read the books, you'll like the show, but for me, it was such an empty show, devoid of excitement or intrigue or entertainment value.
Additionally there are movies who just have something unique to them that a niche audience may love, but both critics and the general audience treat them more harshly.
The truth is that other peoples opinion may or may not be a good proxy for your own taste in movies, even if it was uncorrupted and independent.
Here is a long ass post with some more but they come with a huge disclaimer — they are VERY personal opinions:
If you care a lot about plot and hate holes, go for critic >70%. 60-69% is passable but only if you like the subject/genre of the movie.
Very personal opinion — I find any movie with critic <50% completely unwatchable. I literally want to walk out of the theater. This includes nearly every modern horror movie because characters in horror movies always do dumb things. I know that’s the appeal but I hate it.
The extremely rare horror movie with >85% critic probably won’t be scary but these are personally the only horrors I enjoy (e.g. The Cabin in the Woods).
Movies with audience scores below 60% are hard watches.
>90% critic movies are really well done as in they did their homework. Left no stone unturned. It doesn’t mean that it’s an objectively good or memorable movie (use IMDB scores for that).
If you like
experimental movies and/or are you’re into filmmaking, go for >90% critic and 65-85% audience for gems. If you’re not, you will HATE these movies.
But watch out — sometimes if you come an across a movie with high critic and low audience, it’s a movie really for people in the movie industry. You have to read the synopsis to figure out which case it is. See Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Superhero movies and fandom movies (e.g. LOTR) need extra consideration. If they didn’t follow source material, audience scores seem to be even lower than if it was original content. On the other hand, it also goes the other way.
If you’re a deep cut kind of person, check to make sure that the movie has a high enough rating count. Scores for less well-known movies are less accurate.
Old movies, especially those older than the 70s-80s, are harder to judge on RT. There seems to be a self-selection bias of people who are only rating those movies because they remembered liking them. But at the same time, they were also more revolutionary for their time (to be fair to the movie).
All of these tips are for movies. I watch few TV shows and don’t have insight into that side of RT.
I guess because such a tool starts with you having to input a ton of data before being useful. Either people don't do that or if they are willing then the platform would be getting lots of valuable data and wants to keep you feeding it to increase their trove of data before selling off to Amazon or Google.
https://www.criticker.com is the best I’ve seen for this. You rate movies relatively and then they match your ratings to people who have similar tastes and recommend based on that. So if you have period westerns all rated highly they’ll see what other movies were rated highly by people so rare period westerns highly. It’s actually pretty genius.
A recommendations Netflix guy explained this quite well, people lie in their reviews, so they mostly don't matter, what matters is watching habits, those clearly show what you really like instead of the imaginary person that rates movies they'd never watch.
So the actual market for something that recommends like that is quite small.
There is Tastedive, which has given both great suggestions as well as recommended utter garbage to me in the past. Very hit or miss, but when it hits it hits.
The last comedy that I saw that matches your description is American Fiction. It didn’t feature too many laugh out loud moments, but it was thought provoking and well done. And yet, 93% from critics and 95% from audiences.
I wonder if audiences can appreciate these movies more than you give them credit for?
Let’s try a few more
- Death of Stalin (94%, 79%) has the pattern you’ve predicted.
- O Brother Where Art Thou? (78%, 89%) has the opposite of the pattern.
- Grand Budapest Hotel (92%, 87%) was appreciated by both, like American Fiction.
I’m just not seeing a pattern here. Looking at comedies that fit your description the critics and audience scores don’t follow a predictable 95%, 70% pattern.
- Ratings are very personal. I find some movies funny but others don’t.
- There’s more factors involved but there’s no point mentioning them because the movies I like are not the movies you might like. Everyone has to find their own multi-dimension multi-axis criteria.
- And lastly, to repeat what someone else said — I see RT scores as a tool, not a verdict. It just has to be accurate enough where I consistently can pick movies I will enjoy.
The classification of "comedy" seems to be a bit ambiguous.
Funny People with Adam Sandler is considered a comedy, and has a trailer to match. But the actual content of the movie is that of a drama / tragedy. (69% critics, 48% audience.)
The Bear (TV show) is called a comedy but everything I've read paints it as... drama.
American Fiction, for me, was a thoughtful drama with dark humor. And I think that's what the audience expected so the scores match. I never thought it was a comedy.
Maybe this is a me problem where I don't consider things comedy when others do.
I mean, Wes Anderson movies aren't exactly comedy either. They are whimsical and silly, and can elicit laughter, but the stories are dramatic.
I generally find IMDB user scores far more reliable and granular for movies. There is a noticeable jump in a movie's quality when it gets a 6.x rating (okay), versus a 7.x (great) versus an 8.x (a Top 500 of all time).
Metacritic is the next most useful, while Rotten Tomatoes is easily the least useful. High critical and user RT reviews often does not provide a good intensity barometer of how good the film actually is. The last ten years I went from being a loyal RT user to completely ignoring their scores altogether.
I have to disagree with your take on "High critic score / low audience score". There is a swathe of more challenging, experimental, or art house movies that fall into this category. These reviews fill the void where another audience only place like imdb falls short.
Maybe we need to define "bad," because I would argue an enjoyable movie is good. Movies don't need to be avant garde to be good. They just need to be entertaining.
I wish this were true, but the critics as a polity just don't have a sophisticated palate. Many individual critics much like many general audience members do, I'm sure.
This sounds appealingly highbrow, but it's not particularly accurate in my experience. I think the critics often get into their own bizarre headspace that nobody else cares about.
I feel pretty confident that Captain Marvel, Emilia Perez, Spy Kids, Sausage Party, The Last Jedi, and Ghostbusters 2016 aren't at much risk of going over the heads of audiences, but you're entitled to your opinion if you think they count as avant garde cinema
> Humanity Has Stopped Producing Bad Art: After a century of trial and error, mankind has perfected the art of cinema, as proven by recent masterworks like Cats, Space Jam: A New Legacy, the live-action Snow White, Red One, and Joker: Folie à Deux. Critics, who were once joyless automatons thriving on takedowns of human creativity, now bask in this golden age of moviemaking, lavishing praise upon the timeless artistry of The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros. Discovery.
This really should appear in professional film reviews.
> To account for this influx of reviewers, Rotten Tomatoes has created a "Top Critic" designation reserved for established media outlets, such as The New York Times and The Atlantic. However, this label has no special bearing on a film's top-line Tomatometer score and is largely incorporated into ancillary aspects of the site.
Just last night, I noticed that I could access the two percentage scores for critic reviews.
If you go to "https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_dilemma", and click on the critic reviews percentage (25%), you get a popup that lets you select between seeing the All Critics score (25%) and Top Critics score (28%).
(And if I'd thought to check Rotten Tomatoes first, when selecting what looked like a fun light comedy on Netflix, I wouldn't have wasted an hour of my life before I said WTF, checked RT, and continued to be in a bad mood.)
Incidentally, I'd love to have the Tomatometer score integrated into my UI for video streaming services. The services seem to instead like to use their own very generous scoring instead. (When they show any score at all. Some like to suppress the ratings for new shows they produced, presumably to avoid shooting down their own poor shows before people watch them by default.) But Rotten Tomatoes is a much better predictor of how I'll like a show than the streaming service scores are. But maybe the streaming services don't want to expose that the majority of the movies and series offered at any time now range from mediocre to outright bad.
>> But maybe the streaming services don't want to expose that the majority of the movies and series offered at any time now range from mediocre to outright bad.
There is no "now" necessary in that sentence.
All media production in all eras is mostly terrible. Music wasn't better in the 80s, or 70s, or 60s, its just that the 80s music you hear today is heavily curated to the good stuff.
It seems like streaming has made it worse, but only because you're watching so much more. In the past movies took effort to watch. You went to the cinema, or video shop. By the time they made it to TV they were curated, or at the very least you knew about them.
There was plenty of dross that made it direct to video that never made it to cinema or TV. (In 1989 I lived for a year at a place with no broadcast TV. We watched 2 videos a night from the local blockbuster-type store. They had a LOT of very crap movies.
To blame streamers for delivering a lot of mediocre content is to miss the root cause. Most new content is mediocre. Or bad. It has always been the way. Streaming just makes it easier to watch.
You guys are opening yourself to manipulation. Why not just be open for surprises? That’s what I do. Most of the time it’s bad surprises, but the occasional masterpiece that everyone else seems to hate make up for it. I do seem to not have the same taste as most people writing reviews though. I almost always find other people’s opinions ludicrous.
Power to you, but you probably miss out on masterpieces in the other direction though. The ones you would be more likely to watch if you spent more time watching those 'conventionally' liked movies, given the limit of time.
I appreciate the sentiment, but time in life is limited. Streaming is 95% slop so it really does pay to let others curate you the best films, with tolerance for a lower rating if it's a genre you particularly like.
I will say that when I used to go to the theaters, which was before the pandemic and I started a family I used metacritic.
I found that any time I went to something that was red, I absolutley regretted it and it was terrible. Yellow was more hit or miss and top green scores were pretty good.
Exceptions were comedy where a lower score could still mean a good film, and politics oriented films, where a bad film with a media approved message could get a really good score even if it sucked.
It’s sad to not get a reliable indicator of that and someone should just resurrect the old score and call it Bad Apples. Since the actual score seems transparent, why not develop a competitor.
Theaters still exist you should go back. I go two or three times a month. If your kid is 4 or older they’ll have a great time. It’s good and healthy to get out of the house!
Regardless of the introduction of sycophantic reviewers, the 3/5 = fresh thing has always been a pretty half-ass threshold imo, and that a fact that a film can be "100% fresh" on RT on the basis of every single reviewer saying "yeah it's nothing special but it's fine, 3 stars" is fairly easy to misinterpret.
I think it's fine as a metric if you read it correctly.
100% means a film is extremely agreeable with whatever audience it has managed to get to. For major releases this can ultimately mean it's actually lacking anything particularly bold or interesting. This results in things like Frost/Nixon or Knives Out having higher ratings than broadly acclaimed films like Mulholland Drive or even There Will Be Blood; I know which ones I'd be more likely to put on with my extended family even if I don't especially like them.
But yeah, it's amazing how many people still don't grasp it after decades of getting angry about it.
Yeah and his point is that's never going to happen lol. People bring up the 100% point a lot and it's a bit silly because a movie with a significant number of ratings is never going to have that kind of distribution.
That's why it's always a hypothetical never backed with actual examples. It's one of those things that sounds plausible until you look at the numbers. Movies close to 100% have pretty high average scores and Movies with majority 3/5's are nowhere near 100%.
Yeah 100% for RT doesn't mean 10/10, but that's it.
It’s just not true in practice: it’s pretty typical to find films with high rotten tomatoes scores and not very high metacritic scores; rotten tomatoes scores are pretty much useless unless you are not very discerning.
Examples:sovereign, how to make a million…, count of monte cristo, etc
Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are not the same site and have different audiences. Even the most popular movies will barely scrap 60 reviewers on Metacritic.
Comparing them directly is meaningless. Unfortunately they removed the average score for critics percentage but it's still there for the audience percentage.
You're also just wrong. Those movies, especially the last two have high Metacritic scores.
> Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are not the same site and have different audiences.
Yes we are talking about aggregating critic reviews. It's true if you like what the mass audience likes you'll be fine with any kind of crude measure like rotten tomatoes (although you'll still be better off with IMDB scores).
> Even the most popular movies will barely scrap 60 reviewers on Metacritic.
If you are talking about critic reviews there really aren't that many movie critics and you don't need that many. If you are talking about user reviews that isn't what the site is geared for (and not what the users of the site want either, just go to IMDB).
> You're also just wrong. Those movies, especially the last two have high Metacritic scores.
75 is not a high metacritic score, not just in absolute terms, but particularly not relative to the (ridiculous) 97% of rotten tomatoes.
If you only want to watch a few movies a year (and presumably want them to be the "best") Metacritic is the only useful site (with the provisos that someone else posted about political films and modulating for your own personal preferences).
>If you are talking about critic reviews there really aren't that many movie critics and you don't need that many.
RT still amasses a few hundred critics, and yes it matters statistically because scores will almost certainly decrease (or at the least be unstable) with more reviews until a statically significant threshold. Below hundred isn't it and a score based on 10 ratings is nigh useless.
>75 is not a high metacritic score, not just in absolute terms, but particularly not relative to the (ridiculous) 97% of rotten tomatoes.
Yes it's a high score. Have you taken a look at what kind of range best picture nominees fall at ? 75 is a high score. We've already established a 97% doesn't mean 9.7/10. Doesn't mean your contrived examples are a reality. I'm sure you can do arithmetic and see what a 3/5 falls to over 10.
> RT still amasses a few hundred critics, and yes it matters statistically because scores will almost certainly decrease (or at the least be unstable) with more reviews until a statically significant threshold.
There aren't a hundred critics worth counting, it's just garbage in garbage out; I don't want every-person-with-a-substack's review, I want the dozen or so top film critics.
> Below hundred isn't it and a score based on 10 ratings is nigh useless.
It really isn't. Metacritic top movies for each year are indicative of the "quality" movies, as you would expect the average of the top 10 movie critics to be.
> Yes it's a high score. Have you taken a look at what kind of range best picture nominees fall at ? 75 is a high score.
No, for this year alone (which is only part way through) there are 68 movies with a score above 75 on Metacritic. If you were watching movies according to score alone that mean you would have to watch more than 8 movies a month just to get to those films (and that's if you refuse to watch movies from any other year).
> We've already established a 97% doesn't mean 9.7/10
We've established that the number is not very useful, far less useful than a 9.7/10 type score is.
Look no one is going to stop you from using Rotten Tomatoes if it meets your needs. For me and many other people who don't have time or desire to watch films below a certain quality we need an actual estimate of a quality score, which Rotten Tomatoes doesn't provide and Metacritic does.
>There aren't a hundred critics worth counting, it's just garbage in garbage out; I don't want every-person-with-a-substack's review, I want the dozen or so top film critics.
This is an argument against aggregation itself, not for Metacritic over RT. If you only trust a dozen specific critics, you should just read them directly. The entire purpose of an aggregator is to gather a wide sample to smooth out individual biases. That's the opposite of 'garbage in garbage out'. If your sample isn't wide as an aggregator, that's a minus no matter how you spin it.
>No, for this year alone... there are 68 movies with a score above 75 on Metacritic.
This is a nonsensical argument. By this logic, if we have a phenomenal year for film where 100 movies get a score over 75, the score itself becomes less valid? A score's meaning is relative to the scale, not the number of films that achieve it.
And Literally hundreds of movies are released every year. 8 a month is a tiny fraction of that.
Your personal viewing capacity doesn't change the fact that 75/100 is objectively a high score.
>We've established that the number is not very useful, far less useful than a 9.7/10 type score is.
No, you've asserted that. We've established they measure two different things. RT measures consensus (% of critics who liked it). Metacritic measures average intensity (a weighted average score). Both are useful. One tells you how many critics would recommend it, the other tells you how much they recommend it, on average. Claiming one is "not very useful" is just stating your personal preference as well as demonstrably false, as rotten tomatoes is very widely used.
> If you only trust a dozen specific critics, you should just read them directly
It's much quicker and easier to just get an aggregated Metascore, which takes a second (and allows you to go in blind). I don't have any desire to read 12 movie review articles for every movie ever released.
> The entire purpose of an aggregator is to gather a wide sample to smooth out individual biases.
The point is to get a useful number not to achieve some platonic ideal in statistics. Again there aren't 100 movies critics worth listening to and I am not looking for popular opinion. If you want popular opinion use IMDB ratings.
> This is a nonsensical argument. By this logic, if we have a phenomenal year for film where 100 movies get a score over 75, the score itself becomes less valid? A score's meaning is relative to the scale, not the number of films that achieve it.
Yes is some fantasy world where that happens you would be right. In the real world that doesn't happen. Even if it did happen many people still have time constraints and want to watch only the best X films a year and Metacritic is just better at doing that than Rotten Tomatoes is. As yet another example "Bob Trevino likes it" is 94 RT vs 70 MC compared with "Past Lives" 95 RT vs MC 94: Which is more informative when selecting a movie? I can list more examples but I can't find any examples that demonstrate the reverse (i.e. that shows that you would be better off listening to RT over MC).
> And Literally hundreds of movies are released every year. 8 a month is a tiny fraction of that. Your personal viewing capacity doesn't change the fact that 75/100 is objectively a high score.
"High score" is an arbitrary definition. For the purposes of the discussion, which is whether Metacritic is a better way to determine which movies to watch, 74 doesn't cross the threshold of worth watching (absent some other factor) unless you watch more than 8 movies a month (and only want to watch movies released this year).
> No, you've asserted that. We've established they measure two different things. RT measures consensus (% of critics who liked it). Metacritic measures average intensity (a weighted average score). Both are useful. One tells you how many critics would recommend it, the other tells you how much they recommend it, on average. Claiming one is "not very useful" is just stating your personal preference as well as demonstrably false, as rotten tomatoes is very widely used.
Again, it is not useful in the sense of choosing movies to watch if you are even mildly selective. I gave another example above showing why. It's true that many people don't care about that, they just want something that the average person finds entertaining for 1.5 hours, and Rotten Tomatoes is fine for that. If you have a quality threshold higher than that or would rather watch a better movie than a worse one then it isn't.
A movie with 100% on RT will never in practice get an average score of 6/10. This was the original point of contention. Nothing you've said so far has made this statement any less true, nor do you have any examples to refute it.
>It's much quicker and easier to just get an aggregated Metascore... I don't have any desire to read 12 movie review articles
So your argument against a broad-sample aggregator (RT) is to use a slightly-less-broad-sample aggregator (MC)? You complain about "every-person-with-a-substack" but you're still relying on an aggregation of dozens of critics you've never heard of. You're just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and calling it "quality."
>"High score" is an arbitrary definition. For the purposes of the discussion... 74 doesn't cross the threshold of worth watching
You're confusing your personal, subjective viewing threshold with an objective measure of quality. A score is what it is. 75/100 is the top quartile. That is, by definition, a high score. Whether you have enough time in your life to watch every movie in the top quartile is completely irrelevant to the validity of the score itself.
Now this is more besides the point but i really do think that you're using a tool (Metacritic's average score) for a job it wasn't designed for: being the sole arbiter of what's worth your time. A film's "quality" is not a single, objective number. It depends on genre, intent, and audience.
Is a 95-rated historical epic 'better' than the 'best' horror film of the year that only managed an 82 on Metacritic? Your system says yes, which is absurd. They're trying to do different things.
Not to mention your method is overly biased towards one specific type of film: the prestige drama. If that's the only kind of film you like to watch then cool i guess, but if not then what you're currently doing is nonsensical.
>As yet another example "Bob Trevino likes it" is 94 RT vs 70 MC compared with "Past Lives" 95 RT vs MC 94: Which is more informative when selecting a movie? I can list more examples but I can't find any examples that demonstrate the reverse (i.e. that shows that you would be better off listening to RT over MC).
Even the most well received movies have a few mixed, negative or less positive than the consensus reviews. You could well be one of them. So the RT score tries to answers the question..."What are the odds i'll like this movie?"
This is a very useful information to have especially because i'm not a zombie picking movies to watch because of a single average score from an echo chamber of critics (which is bizarrely what you seem to be doing).
If the synopsis of Bob Trevino is more interesting to me, I would absolutely pick it over Past Lives especially if the latter seems more divisive.
They are complementary scores. Only when two movies seem to be the same type of film with the same type of distribution of scores will i favor the average score.
The original point of contention was that the "percent that approve" of the film that RT uses is surprising and not as useful as a regular rating system. (By the way the average score is now hidden on RT).
> So your argument against a broad-sample aggregator (RT) is to use a slightly-less-broad-sample aggregator (MC)?
My argument is to use useful aggregation of experts instead of a much less useful one.
> You complain about "every-person-with-a-substack" but you're still relying on an aggregation of dozens of critics you've never heard of.
I don't need to have "heard of them" to know that the NYT film critic, the reviewer at Siskel and Ebert and the film critic at Vanity Fair are probably more worth listening to than the "MacGuffin or Meaning Substack".
> You're just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and calling it "quality."
No, the opinions of the film critics for the top publications in the world are not arbitrary.
> You're confusing your personal, subjective viewing threshold with an objective measure of quality. A score is what it is. 75/100 is the top quartile. That is, by definition, a high score. Whether you have enough time in your life to watch every movie in the top quartile is completely irrelevant to the validity of the score itself.
Beside the fact that the rating isn't the percentile ranking of film the entire point of the discussion is which site better helps you choose films. Again the definition of "high score" is completely arbitrary and irrelevant.
> Now this is more besides the point but i really do think that you're using a tool (Metacritic's average score) for a job it wasn't designed for: being the sole arbiter of what's worth your time. A film's "quality" is not a single, objective number. It depends on genre, intent, and audience.
I never said that. It's a helpful filtering mechanism. I watch low rated films if they are a genre I particularly like (just like I eat junk food without claiming that it is haute-cuisine) and I don't watch movies if they are not in a style I enjoy. Apropos of your example I don't like horror so I don't watch it, irrespective of the score.
> Not to mention your method is overly biased towards one specific type of film: the prestige drama. If that's the only kind of film you like to watch then cool i guess, but if not then what you're currently doing is nonsensical.
Most films are dramas as far as I know. In any case you can filter on categories so it's irrelevant.
> The RT score tries to answers the question..."What are the odds i'll like this movie?".
Well it's closer to what are the odds the average person will like it, which isn't what I want: I want 1. to be able to pick a better movie rather than a worse one and 2. be able to threshold on higher quality than the average person.
> This is a very useful information to have especially because i'm not a zombie picking movies to watch because of a single average score from an echo chamber of critics (which is bizarrely what you seem to be doing).
No one is doing this, they are using Metacritic as a starting point to filter and rank movies which, once again, RT doesn't do a good job at because of it's binary classifier system and inclusion of everyone under the sun.
> If the synopsis of Bob Trevino is more interesting to me, I would absolutely pick it over Past Lives. They are complementary scores.
That's fine and as I said something I and everyone else does, just like I eat junk food (and maybe sometimes actually prefer to some 3-star Michelin restaurant). The problem is pretending that those two films are roughly the same quality, or that because someone sometimes prefers a lower critic ranked movie that ratings don't matter: you can make the same argument about preferring a "rotten" RT movie.
You seem to be arguing in circles and are now actively misrepresenting my points to defend your own.
>The original point of contention was that the "percent that approve" of the film that RT uses is surprising and not as useful as a regular rating system.
No, the original point I was responding to was the tired, hypothetical claim that a movie could get "100% fresh" with every critic giving it a middling 3/5 stars. My point was that in practice, this never happens. You have provided zero evidence to the contrary and have now shifted the goalposts to a vague, subjective debate about "usefulness.". The original comment is right there. You can read.
>I don't need to have "heard of them" to know that the NYT film critic, the reviewer at Siskel and Ebert and the film critic at Vanity Fair are probably more worth listening to than the "MacGuffin or Meaning Substack".
This is just gatekeeping masquerading as an argument. They have more to say on the mechanics of film, not on what movies you'll think are the best. It's especially ridiculous when you realize that RT gets reviews from these 'top critics' and you can filter for them.
>The RT score tries to answers the question..."What are the odds the average person will like it"...
The RT percentage has a critics and top critics score so no it's not, not anymore than the metacritic score is 'the score the average person will give it'. That's not how statistics work.
>That's fine and as I said something I and everyone else does, just like I eat junk food (and maybe sometimes actually prefer to some 3-star Michelin restaurant). The problem is pretending that those two films are roughly the same quality, or that because someone sometimes prefers a lower critic ranked movie that ratings don't matter: you can make the same argument about preferring a "rotten" RT movie.
There's nothing to pretend. If i think it's better then it's better for me. What critics say doesn't matter. It's really sad that you apparently characterize movies you like with lower critic scores as 'junk food'. Have a mind of your own.
> You have provided zero evidence to the contrary and have now shifted the goalposts to a vague, subjective debate about "usefulness.". The original comment is right there. You can read.
I literally provided several examples of unreasonable/misleading scores (there isn't an API so this is the best you can do). You on the other hand haven't provided any examples to show when RT is more useful than MC. The context of the original criticism is that the RT score is misleading and less useful than an actual rating.
> This is just gatekeeping masquerading as an argument. They have more to say on the mechanics of film, not on what movies you'll think are the best. It's especially ridiculous when you realize that RT gets reviews from these 'top critics' and you can filter for them.
It's not gatekeeping to recognize that there are actual experts in matter of taste who are going to be way more informative than the average joe. The implication of your argument is that every jack-asses opinion is just as valuable. No one actually believes this. And I don't know how many times I need to say this but I don't want to read a dozen critic reviews, I want a summary statistic (so that you can get a rough ranking of movies).
> The RT percentage has a critics and top critics score so no it's not, not anymore than the metacritic score is 'the score the average person will give it'. That's not how statistics work.
The problem is that the summary statistic (even if the average score was still visible) on RT includes so many people that it is closer to average opinion than critic opinion. That's apart from the problem with hot-or-not binary classification.
> There's nothing to pretend. If i think it's better then it's better for me. What critics say doesn't matter. It's really sad that you apparently characterize movies you like with lower critic scores as 'junk food'. Have a mind of your own.
I have explicitly said that I don't dogmatically follow critic opinions (no one does). The point is the opinions have value as a starting point to filter/select films that is better than popular opinion or a binary thresholding type system.
Once again you can make your same argument against any rating system (IMDB, RT,e tc) and absurdly claim that if you use those as a starting point to select films that you don't "have a mind of your own". In fact you can do this for ratings of any product or service and make the absolutely trivial point that a person's personal preferences or situation can deviate from consensus expert rankings. It's silly to then conclude that one ranking system can't be better than another or that popular opinion is equally valuable compared to expert opinion.
Yeah, I'd love a personalised Tomatometer. I'd only get out of bed for something 4 stars (8/10) or above, so I'd love to know the percentage of audience/reviewers that scored like that.
This would also give "cult classics" and interesting/creative films that are more love-it-or-hate-it a bit more of an edge in ratings over the lukewarm Marvel slop we see these days.
I find IMDb better than RT. RT even though it has an Audience score. It tends to give priority to the Critics' score, which in most cases we know is influential in one way or another.
IMDb score doesn't rely on a group of people, but on all users. It may give a little more weightage to the US users, but that's fine. Its top movies and TV shows make a lot more sense, unlike RT.
Compared to the example of the medical records, Netflix had been very careful not to add any data that could identify a user, like zip-code, birthdate, and of course name, personal IDs, etc. Nevertheless, only a couple of weeks after the release, another PhD student, Arvind Narayanan, announced that they (together with his advisor Vitaly Shmatikov), had been able to connect many of the unique IDs in the Netflix dataset to real people, by cross referencing another publicly available dataset: the movie ratings in the IMDB site, where many users post publicly with their own names.
I agree. I stopped relying on RT scores years ago. There are far fewer occasions when the audience score doesn't align with my preferences. Today I am so far away from most critics in taste and preference, it's like they live on another planet.
is a listing of 2019 movie torrents ranked by seeds (number of clients holding full copies of a torrent version).
A normalization challenge is to group torrent variations (1080p rips and 720p rips and WEB-DL's and BluRay and etc.) and tally up and rank interest in various films over time.
Clearly Ne Zha (2019), a Chinese Animation, Fantasy, Adventure movie was a global pirate star of that year .. should it be "normalized" by population of country of origin to smooth out the home team having a billion+ in population "bias" ?
One advantage of ranking films by year and pirate copies is it provides a pragmatic measure of "staying power"
My Fair Lady, Dr Strangelove, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Mary Poppins, A Fistful of Dollars, and Goldfinger are still being hoarded 60 years after their release.
I just attend my local independent cinema. Sometimes I’m blown away. Sometimes the film sucks, but there are only 3-4 options at any given time. Simplifies the decision, and at the very least, they serve beer.
I only rely on IMDb scores and they're still reliable if enough time has passed since the movie release. A movie with more than 6 avg is usually enjoyable, while below 6 is not worth watching. Over 7 is usually very good, over 8 is a masterpiece
I agree wholeheartedly. What none of the review sites have figured out is how to adjust TV show user scores so that they don't score so much higher than movies.
It’s interesting that people pay close attention to one-size-fits all number (regardless of the pros and cons of the methodology used to derive said number). I find RT really useful for collating the reviews from “top” reviewers in one place: over the years, I know how my interests align with the tastes of particular reviewers, and I don’t have to look in multiple places to get a snapshot view of their opinions.
The idea that something like a movie's "good"-ness (or whatever) could be measured accurately, reliably or even usefully, by experts or laypeople, should be absurd on its face to any right-thinking person.
What a movie does or does not do for you will depend on a host of things which couldn't possibly be blamed on the movie itself - there's no objective experience of a movie.
The lighting, what you had for dinner, the comfort of your chair, if the baby starts crying, who you're with in the room, how they're feeling, whether you actually really have time for a movie or should be doing something else, if you're 16 and just had your first break up 3 days before, whether you saw the original movie 30 years ago or totally missed the boat, if you've smoked a few spliffs with your friends in the car in the parking lot of the cinema beforehand, etc etc.
People who think differently are, I think, simply going along with a very peculiar recent trend.
It's a general effect the Internet has had on our aesthetics. We no longer think our experience matters or even really exists, instead we think our take on the thing in its social context amongst all the other people's takes is all that matters and exists.
Liking something means liking it exactly how the average person liked it, and sharing a "take" means describing how we deviated, ever so slightly, from the agreed-upon-reading of the agreed-upon-thing. In reality, if you watch a movie ten times, you've had ten different experiences. If one hundred people watch a movie, there have been one hundred different experiences.
It's a great shame that we've forgotten this fact, and lost ourselves in a culture of "reacting".
There's truth to that, but the vast majority of people can figure out that a movie is bad, no matter what they had for dinner or what's going on in their lives.
We're not looking for the Platonic form of the movie review, but just a simple "Is this movie trash? Is it amazing?" aggregated reaction from viewers.
It's simple: When there's money to be made, the folks with the money to make, will pull out the stops to game the reviews. We have seen this in just about every review system ever (except Consumer Reports). They game it, milk some money, until everyone figures out it sucks, then abandon it. The reviewers count on getting brought.
I really miss Mr. Cranky[0, 1]. Here's his review of Battlefield Earth[2]:
Yes I was going to say something similar. I often use a blend on IMDb score and rotten tomatoes to judge whether I should watch a movie.
The only thing I will say is that IMDB scores are also (likely) gamed by movie studios to artificially inflate their scores. You also need to be careful with certain genres and series on IMDB that attract positive ratings from the archetypal IMDB user. This is why marvel movies and such receive such sky high ratings.
Basically if the movie is not a mainstream superhero type blockbuster full of cgi you can use the IMDB score if your judgement
I still miss the times when I would decide to watch a movie based on the cover at the VHS store or based on a recommendation. Much faster, way more serendipity.
Its not just Rotten Tomatoes, the vast majority of so called "Reviews" the average consumer sees these days are being manipulated in service of corporate interests.
Amazon's full of paid reviews for scam products, so called "Independent" review sites like Wirecutter are basically just advertorial hosting platforms now, or are even secretly owned by the companies who's products are being "Reviewed," 99% of YouTube reviews are nothing more than sponsored content that regurgitates press release talking points from companies who provide the reviewers free products, Google and Yelp reviews of local businesses have an entire manipulation industry built up around them (Just Google "Yelp review service" to see what I'm talking about," and the sad reality we live in now is most anywhere you go, most so called "Reviews" you see these days are either from bots or corporate shills.
We officially live in the "No trust" era and its only going to get so, so much worse from here.
Highly recommend MovieLens if you have eclectic or niche movie tastes. It can be a bit of a nerd-snipe though. One of my favorites activities is rating movies and watching the recommended ratings (what rating it thinks I'll give a movie) update overnight.
It's at the very least, better than average chance at predicting which movies you will like.
Movie reviews (stars) given on Amazon Prime's streaming service always seemed incredibly sus. All the bad movies from the long-tail back catalog all seemed remarkably highly-rated. Typical pattern: Forth-rate sci-fi action movie amalgamation of the 12 other well-known sci-fi action hits? Yes!! Four stars!
Just assumed Prime's claimed ratings were untrustworthy and must be based on some corporate "we'll promote your dreck, no problem-o!" data feed. But a bit sadder that Rotten Tomatoes, once at least reasonably legit and crowd-sourced, now poisoned by the same "everything's good! watch it! watch it!" inflation. Not surprising. Anti-surprising, really. Still a bit sad.
Thank you for the excellent historical, statistical deep dive.
In my experience of film reviews, Rotten Tomatoes high positive scores are not always representative of how entertaining some content will be.. However, the negative skew is almost always accurate for how bad something will be for all viewers.
The bimodal distribution of professional critics versus community opinions obviously describes what is happening behind the data. Recycled AstroTurf for 1980's cult films have little appeal to modern viewers even with maximal pandering for nostalgia.
Good Hollywood writers likely starved to death, and were replaced with LLM interpreted Nielsen Media Research data. Most video games offer better writing now... lol =3
Would there be some selection bias as well? As info about movies becomes readily available, generally the people who go see movies would have decided that they would probably enjoy said movie, and write favourable reviews
If they're actual movie reviewers then their job is to go see films regardless of whether they think they'd personally enjoy them. Some of the best reviews come from reviewers who have to go and see something they absolutely hate and would never go see for their own entertainment.
The one and only time I used the site, I discovered "Black Panther" was the number one movie of all time. Thats all the analysis I needed to reach a verdict.
I’ve always preferred Metacritic because it assigns a weighted average. RT only tells you the “approval rate,” the percentage of favorable ratings. I don’t care if 100% of critics and fans agreed it was better than total crap.
Seems like it's been common knowledge for a while that the critic reviews are useless, but the audience reviews are still valuable. You just have to make sure to actually look at the audience score.
I completely lost faith in Rotten Tomatoes after consistently seeing Marvel capeshit, including their worst slop, reliably get high audience and critical scores.
That’s a pretty good point. Lots of films find an audience post marketing phase and have a long tail. If the marketing phase had connected better their tail might be shorter.
There needs to be a "score from people who produce scores like me" for everything. E.g. for coffee shops I really don't care if the staff are rude but I care if there are tables and it's clean and the WiFi is good.
I was thinking of having granular scoring e.g. having people rate WiFi, rate cleanliness etc but that won't work because people are lazy. So some kind of Amazon algorithm of "people who buy similar things" but for movie, cafe, etc ratings.
To bring it back on topic, for movies I care about good story and visuals but not so much how "woke or not" it is, I prefer if it's intelligent Vs dumb except if it's a comedy then dumb is fine, and so on.
Its absolutely hopeless. The rankings are gamed because Rotten Tomato still carries some semblance of credibility (although in this post Trump winning era, sources of credibility can get eroded more quickly)
It does not get clearer than when a political movie comes out. 2018 was an interesting year, two movies came out that really allowed me to get a clearer picture of what was going on: "Knock Down The House" and "Death of a Nation".
When "Knock Down The House" (documentary featuring the leftwing US politician AOC) came out, I got interested in scraping the data off of Rotten Tomatoes and studying it.
Before making any moves, I first watched the movie for myself in a theater (and also got to see a live Q&A with the director to understand her thought process)
The movie had at the time a 100% rating from critics and ~80% from viewers. After watching it, I would concur with the viewer ranking but felt that the critic ranking was unusually high. Seriously? 100%? (It has now gone down to 99% but still). In regards to the viewer ranking I conceded that I was probably biased which is why I also ran this experiment on Death of a Nation (also saw in theaters but to a room with only one other moviegoer).
Knock Down the House eventually got featured on Tucker Carlson like a year after release(I think it coincided with Netflix making it free on youtube). I watched in realtime how the movie critic score kept going down and down and down to where it is now (11%). Dumping the scraped data, I ran a simple analysis and discovered a large portion of the people ranked it with no comments, or simplistic things like how stupid AOC is and many had had no other ratings other than this movie or the only other film is the one featuring Illhan Omar (another politician hated by the right).
For Death of a nation, the scores were flipped. A whopping 0% in the critic score(12 reviews) while the user score stood at a respectable 87% (again at the time when I did my scraping yet again we saw tons of 1 movie reviewers). Yeah the movie royally sucked and was painful to watch but 0%? That was a bit fishy. This essentially killed any credibility that I had in Rotten Tomatoes.
I started to trust places like /r/movies and /r/AMCsAList only to get burned by that as well when movies recommended in the comments would end up being terrible and then when I went back to criticize the films, I would get criticized and downvoted to non visible status. It was not a definite signal but gave me the feeling that there is a lot of astroturfing going on there as well.
Furthermore, these movies promoted on Reddit would typically be in 3/5 range on Rotten tomatoes which further made me think there is no real way to get a real signal if a film is likely to be good or not.
What I started to do was not a great metric but has helped cut down on the cruft: Follow specific actors/directors I really liked and ones that I felt were in it to make good films. As an example, actresses like Mary Elizabeth Winstead have turned down big roles in favor of indie films or other interesting scripts to the detriment of her career but the films have been more enjoyable and interesting. In each film I also find other actors to follow and if I start to see more studio promotion of a specific person (for example Anya Taylor Joy after The Queens Gambit) I start to caution away and sometimes just drop that actor from the list. In her case I stuck to films she worked with other people that I determined I liked(like Edgar Wright) before feeling like there is too much promotion going on and just dropping her from the list. Other than this, I fill out my list with franchises I like or subjects that I always give a chance to (science/space, etc.).
I know I am leaving out a lot of potential good films but the noise has become unbearable to the point where I don't want to waste my time anymore.
A few years later Rotten Tomatoes introduced "Verified Reviews". I thought this will be amazing as now it will only include people with skin in the game (ie. verified to have paid for a ticket)...except now this has been completely hijacked as well.
Going back to the example of political films now what the right wing does is they have a billionaire finance a film through some intermediary group then free tickets to the movie are given out at conservative events. People books seats to the movie, promote it on social media, post a "Verified Review" and then often don't show up to the screening. I have discovered sold out screenings to some of these movies but when I went to the theater to see some other film, i'd often peek into the screening of these films only to find they are almost empty. The movie plays regardless of if someone shows up or not. Furthermore some of these films actually have a code that they show at the end of the film to gift a free ticket to a friend so the box office numbers of these films are inflated and its all a bunch of hogwash.
Like I said its hopeless. In a way we saw the rise of this new fake world play out in Hollywood before it took over social media and the rest of the internet now. How will it end? People trusting only what they already know they like or from trusted friends and everything else is ignored.
This article has got me thinking of an interesting idea though: What if we go and determine which of the critics are known to provide reviews that reflect our tastes (maybe by reading reviews of movies that we enjoyed), then pull only those review data and compute a new Tomato score based only on those critics? We could toss the Rotten Tomatoes tomato meter in the trash and get back to a legitimate review that you could use as a positive signal again.
IMDB also had a ratings inflation of about 0.5 points about the same time (anecdata), where movies over 5.5 were watchable back then. Now a 6.0+ demarcates a watchable movie. Or my threshold changed in the past 10 years or so...
I find RT scores very accurate but not the raw score.
What I mean is that a 70% score is meaningless to me. I need to know the movie genre, the audience score, the age of the movie and then I basically do a “lookup table” in my head. And I have that lookup table because I’ve looked up every movie I’ve watched on RT for 15 years so I know how the scores correlate to my own personal opinions.
As an example: the author said that critic scores should align with audience scores but no that’s not true at all. Critics tend to care more about plot continuity, plot depth and details while the audience tends to care about enjoyability. Both are important to me so I always look at both scores. That’s why a lot of very funny comedies have a 60-69% critic score but a 90%-100% audience score — because it’s hilarious but the plot makes no fucking sense and has a million holes. And if you see a comedy with 95% critic but 70% audience, it will be thought-provoking and well done but don’t expect more than occasional chuckles.
Plex shows you both critic and audience scores from RT (IMDB also) and they indeed diverge consistently on the lines you suggest. In general I trust the audience scores a lot more because I'm trying to have fun watching movies rather than analyze their plot/pacing/cinematography/etc.
The audience can be trusted to know how to have fun. The discrepancy between critic and audience scores is also a valuable signal to judge how fun campy/schlocky/B-movie horror films particularly from the 80s and 90s.
Rotten Tomatoes becomes way more useful once you treat it as a tool rather than a verdict
In Rotten Tomatoes there's always That Guy who's being contrary for the sake of being different.
Like Paddington and Paddington 2 had 100% review scores for a long time, until some "reviewers" disliked it on purpose bringing Paddington 2 to 99%
Using multiple sites as an aggregate works. In IMDB you need to check the vote distribution graph and in your mind take out all the 1's and 10's and see where the average/median lies after that.
And it's important to find actual reviewers whose taste aligns with yours and use them as more directed guidance.
>Paddington 2
After Chat recommended this as "on par with Shawshank," I watched this last week.
What did I just watch? Why would I recommend this movie to anybody?
It’s a happy movie. No grimdark no blood or guns, low stakes and just pure joy.
>It's a happy movie ... just pure joy.
That's fair. I am an insufferable person, so it checks out.
same is true for product reviews in online shops
I often enjoy movies that are unexpected and don't fit neatly into one established genre, but I think these tend to get lower audience ratings, while films that deliver to expectations do better, even if most of a randomly selected audience would dislike them. If a movie is a comedy, with a poster with big red letters and a white background, people know it's a certain kind of movie, and mostly those who enjoy those movies will go see it. Likewise with documentaries about some niche interest - those who watch it mostly sought it out because they're into that.
Same. I’m big into filmmaking and arthouse films. But other times I may just want something simple.
Using RT’s two-axis score distribution helps narrow down movies.
My immediate thought after seeing the first chart was that it is inversely related to my own experience with movies in the last 20 years. Maybe there's an idea in there for a 'score normalizing' browser extension.
Always wondered why Rings of Power have 84% critics score but just 49% audience.
One important factor is that the critics score is binary in a sense: if all critics agree that the movie was "passable but not great" then Rotten Tomatoes still gives it a 100% critics score.
The website explains it clearly enough I would say.
Because critics get paid, whilst audience have to pay.
> Report says PR firm has been paying Rotten Tomatoes critics for positive reviews (screengeek.net) 254 points by mc32 on Sept 7, 2023
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37419427
I didn't like the idea that my money had paid for such a disservice of my favourite book, so it pushed me to cancel my Prime subscription that had been ongoing for years. I don't buy nearly as much on Amazon these days as a consequence.
I am annoyed by Rings of Power, but at least we got some fairly passable (if still very flawed) adaptations from Peter Jackson. I'm more salty about Wheel of Time, because that trashed the source material just as hard, and because it bombed it's unlikely we will ever see someone try again with an actual good adaptation.
I rarely get angry about bad content but RoP felt like a personal affront. I love Tolkien's world and the people who put RoP together did so with not just ignorance and incompetence, but some kind of malice. They intentionally butchered Tolkien's writing and world. This stands in such stark contrast with Peter Jackson's position that it is not his right to inject his personal values and narcissistic hubris into the movies. He chose to honour the material as best he could while adapting it. It is, without any shadow of a doubt, the better approach.
> but some kind of malice
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence :)
I bet the RoP team are great content creation professionals. They obey all the rules of their craft.
They also do not care about the material at all, otherwise they'd be script writers and directors, not content creators.
> This stands in such stark contrast with Peter Jackson's position that it is not his right to inject his personal values and narcissistic hubris into the movies. He chose to honour the material as best he could while adapting it.
That's funny, because that's very much not what happened with those movies. Remember the character assassination of Faramir? I recall Jackson (or perhaps Fran Walsh) saying in an interview that they deliberately broke from Tolkien's story with that one, because the way Tolkien wrote it didn't fit the story they were trying to tell. They felt that having someone set the One Ring aside when tempted undermined the idea of building up the Ring as a threat in the minds of the audience. In other words, they chose to go with the story they wanted to tell rather than honoring the story Tolkien told.
Certainly the LOTR movies weren't as flagrant as Rings of Power with the liberties they took. And some of the changes were indeed due to the constraints of adapting to the medium of film, rather than a book. But even so, they chose to disrespect the source material pretty blatantly at times.
It's fair to point out the difference re Faramir but I feel it is rather small and inconsequential. He ultimately made the same decision in both the book and movie. Again, I am not contending that no changes were made. A movie adaptation requires changes. I'm claiming that the changes were in service to the material, lore, world-buildings, themes, and messaging. The RoP writers thumbed their noses at all of that.
To me that feels like sacrificing a detail to service the larger story, which when you're trying to fit three whole books into just three movies might be necessary. In RoP they made many changes nilly-willy, missing most of what made the source material great.
Critics often score based on first few episodes to be released in, and never revisit the score. And if it's shiny/ expensive (and RoP was both) and seems like it might lead somewhere, they risk ridiculing themselves by being too critical.
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Critics have a political agenda, they overrate movies with “a message”, the message being always leaning Californian. The movie industry is a massive sector with lobbies, and paid critics are no stranger to that.
And as the sibling says, audience pays to see a movie. The audience, the people, are more politically balanced. There is no bias or selection: It’s the democratic components, including people that the “in” lobbies don’t like.
If only we could get rid of this damn audience!
Your OP just gave examples of bias.
Obviously individuals still have preferences and biases. The idea is that they are less aligned than critics, so they average each other out somewhat.
The claim was "There is no bias or selection".
And there's no evidence for "the idea". Also the "audience" reviewers are self-selecting, and in my experience tilt towards shallowness and bigotry. My own preferences are generally better aligned with the top critics.
If I weren't already well familiar with the diverse critic reviews on RT, claims that the critics are "woke" (or equivalently, have a "Californian" "political agenda" that "overrates" movies with a message) would be reason for me to value their views over self-selecting "audience" reviews, which I find to be mostly shallow and uninformed, and with a good dose of provincial bigotry as part of the "political balance". I personally am not looking for "political balance", certainly not as that currently manifests itself in the U.S.
And if paid critics are no stranger to lobbies (or the movie industry as a massive sector with lobbies ... it's a bit hard to parse), I see no particular reason to expect them to have a political agenda that overrates movies with a message--I don't think those are the ones that make big bucks for the massive sector. (I'm more interested in indie fare, or at least stuff with more character and depth and less CGI and juvenile superheroes vs. supervillains.) Much more likely is that this spew reflects a political agenda.
I thought "Californian bias" was a great term precisely because it isn't quite the same (or as shallow) as "woke". How could the movie industry not have a Californian bias? So much of it is made in that very peculiar culture, peculiar even by American standards.
And yet if you hated that sort of thing, why (or how?) would you become a movie critic? Can you imagine being a classical music critic and intensely disliking Vienna? (Another damn peculiar, damn influential culture, by the way).
I agree. It is clear and self-evident that movie critics have a California bias. I cite Emilia Perez (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/emilia_perez) with a 71% of critics recommending the movie. This movie won *91 awards* this season. This is, by any objective and subjective metric, an atrocious film. Audiences gave it 17% on Rotten and 5.4 on IMDB. Why did this movie win so many awards and positive reviews from critics? Because it has a trans person as the lead. That's it. The bias is on full display with this movie.
But that is more about "woke" than California. My point was that California is peculiar in far more complicated ways than merely being more trans-positive. Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't seem especially "woke" to me, but he seems very California. Scientology is hardly "woke", but it's very California. Steve Jobs, same. Utterly weird culture, if we hadn't been so extremely exposed to it. We think of so many things as normal, even though they're not normal at all in our actual lives where we are, but they're normal in California. (Well, more normal). That was Vienna too. It goes way beyond a simple culture war dichotomy.
I completely agree. Feels a bit ironic that not only do anti-woke conservatives seem to implicitly believe California = woke, but this unnuanced read is apparently held a plurality of liberals as well.
A California bias is not the same as being woke. 6 time Oscar award winner and 14 time Oscar Nominee film La La Land wasn't especially woke, but it was damn near manufactured in a lab to appeal to the exact sort of sensibilities that are held by Academy members.
The focus on careerism and social climbing, the nostalgia for an era of media since gone by, the melancholic reality of how damn near impossible it is to succeed as an actor or musician, these aren't woke ideas, but they do reflect the general sentimentality of the people in the greater LA area.
Something I thought you might get into would be series, whether movies or TV / sequels. Sometimes they get devoted fans who love the whole series, and those sequels or later season have great scores, but you might not enjoy them whatsoever.
My example would be a TV show, A Discovery of Witches which is overall well-received, but I couldn't enjoy at all. Perhaps if you read the books, you'll like the show, but for me, it was such an empty show, devoid of excitement or intrigue or entertainment value.
Additionally there are movies who just have something unique to them that a niche audience may love, but both critics and the general audience treat them more harshly.
The truth is that other peoples opinion may or may not be a good proxy for your own taste in movies, even if it was uncorrupted and independent.
Too bad the two ratings categories are "critic" and "audience" instead of "plot", "humor", "characters", "suspense", ...
Please list a few more insights like this for picking good movies, thanks!
Additionally, I think someone could build an interesting RT browser based on these kinds of insights.
Here is a long ass post with some more but they come with a huge disclaimer — they are VERY personal opinions:
If you care a lot about plot and hate holes, go for critic >70%. 60-69% is passable but only if you like the subject/genre of the movie.
Very personal opinion — I find any movie with critic <50% completely unwatchable. I literally want to walk out of the theater. This includes nearly every modern horror movie because characters in horror movies always do dumb things. I know that’s the appeal but I hate it.
The extremely rare horror movie with >85% critic probably won’t be scary but these are personally the only horrors I enjoy (e.g. The Cabin in the Woods).
Movies with audience scores below 60% are hard watches.
>90% critic movies are really well done as in they did their homework. Left no stone unturned. It doesn’t mean that it’s an objectively good or memorable movie (use IMDB scores for that).
If you like experimental movies and/or are you’re into filmmaking, go for >90% critic and 65-85% audience for gems. If you’re not, you will HATE these movies.
But watch out — sometimes if you come an across a movie with high critic and low audience, it’s a movie really for people in the movie industry. You have to read the synopsis to figure out which case it is. See Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Superhero movies and fandom movies (e.g. LOTR) need extra consideration. If they didn’t follow source material, audience scores seem to be even lower than if it was original content. On the other hand, it also goes the other way.
If you’re a deep cut kind of person, check to make sure that the movie has a high enough rating count. Scores for less well-known movies are less accurate.
Old movies, especially those older than the 70s-80s, are harder to judge on RT. There seems to be a self-selection bias of people who are only rating those movies because they remembered liking them. But at the same time, they were also more revolutionary for their time (to be fair to the movie).
All of these tips are for movies. I watch few TV shows and don’t have insight into that side of RT.
What I find weird is that no one has solved the "people like you also liked this" problem for ratings/reviews.
All ratings on these platforms are average values through the entire cross-section of people.
Yet I am sure that they are people who have a very similar taste like me. I want to read their reviews, see their ratings, and recommendations.
Social media platforms do that pretty well these days.
I guess because such a tool starts with you having to input a ton of data before being useful. Either people don't do that or if they are willing then the platform would be getting lots of valuable data and wants to keep you feeding it to increase their trove of data before selling off to Amazon or Google.
I already rated hundreds of movies and TV shows on IMDB, for example. This could be used as a basis.
https://www.criticker.com is the best I’ve seen for this. You rate movies relatively and then they match your ratings to people who have similar tastes and recommend based on that. So if you have period westerns all rated highly they’ll see what other movies were rated highly by people so rare period westerns highly. It’s actually pretty genius.
A recommendations Netflix guy explained this quite well, people lie in their reviews, so they mostly don't matter, what matters is watching habits, those clearly show what you really like instead of the imaginary person that rates movies they'd never watch.
So the actual market for something that recommends like that is quite small.
Interesting.
Did you see that online somewhere?
Don't remember where the specific interview was but here's them saying why they killed the star rating: https://about.netflix.com/en/news/goodbye-stars-hello-thumbs
http://www.gnovies.com exists since 2002.
(Other media: http://www.gnod.com)
If you use Letterboxd, https://letterboxd.samlearner.com/ is good for this purpose.
Rateyourmusic.com / Sonemic added movie scores/reviews a long time ago. You can follow people and their scores will be visible for you.
They kind of have, that's how Netflix and Spotify recommended for you stuff works
There is Tastedive, which has given both great suggestions as well as recommended utter garbage to me in the past. Very hit or miss, but when it hits it hits.
The last comedy that I saw that matches your description is American Fiction. It didn’t feature too many laugh out loud moments, but it was thought provoking and well done. And yet, 93% from critics and 95% from audiences.
I wonder if audiences can appreciate these movies more than you give them credit for?
Let’s try a few more
- Death of Stalin (94%, 79%) has the pattern you’ve predicted.
- O Brother Where Art Thou? (78%, 89%) has the opposite of the pattern.
- Grand Budapest Hotel (92%, 87%) was appreciated by both, like American Fiction.
I’m just not seeing a pattern here. Looking at comedies that fit your description the critics and audience scores don’t follow a predictable 95%, 70% pattern.
A few things:
- Ratings are very personal. I find some movies funny but others don’t.
- There’s more factors involved but there’s no point mentioning them because the movies I like are not the movies you might like. Everyone has to find their own multi-dimension multi-axis criteria.
- And lastly, to repeat what someone else said — I see RT scores as a tool, not a verdict. It just has to be accurate enough where I consistently can pick movies I will enjoy.
Death of Stalin is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. It's been a long time since I laughed so hard at a movie or TV show.
And I laughed my ass off watching American Fiction. These are funny movies! Just a different vibe from say Talladega Nights.
The classification of "comedy" seems to be a bit ambiguous.
Funny People with Adam Sandler is considered a comedy, and has a trailer to match. But the actual content of the movie is that of a drama / tragedy. (69% critics, 48% audience.)
The Bear (TV show) is called a comedy but everything I've read paints it as... drama.
American Fiction, for me, was a thoughtful drama with dark humor. And I think that's what the audience expected so the scores match. I never thought it was a comedy.
Maybe this is a me problem where I don't consider things comedy when others do.
I mean, Wes Anderson movies aren't exactly comedy either. They are whimsical and silly, and can elicit laughter, but the stories are dramatic.
I generally find IMDB user scores far more reliable and granular for movies. There is a noticeable jump in a movie's quality when it gets a 6.x rating (okay), versus a 7.x (great) versus an 8.x (a Top 500 of all time).
Metacritic is the next most useful, while Rotten Tomatoes is easily the least useful. High critical and user RT reviews often does not provide a good intensity barometer of how good the film actually is. The last ten years I went from being a loyal RT user to completely ignoring their scores altogether.
You basically want a cross sectionally standardised score
High critic score / high audience score = Good
High critic score / low audience score = Paid-for hype, or politically motivated reviews
Low critic score / high audience score = Possibly a good movie
Low critic score / low audience score = Bad
I have to disagree with your take on "High critic score / low audience score". There is a swathe of more challenging, experimental, or art house movies that fall into this category. These reviews fill the void where another audience only place like imdb falls short.
Low critic score / high audience score = Bad, but enjoyable for the masses
Maybe we need to define "bad," because I would argue an enjoyable movie is good. Movies don't need to be avant garde to be good. They just need to be entertaining.
I wish this were true, but the critics as a polity just don't have a sophisticated palate. Many individual critics much like many general audience members do, I'm sure.
This sounds appealingly highbrow, but it's not particularly accurate in my experience. I think the critics often get into their own bizarre headspace that nobody else cares about.
this feels like an interview question
Here is a better heuristic:
High critic score / low audience score = Avant garde type films. Might go over your head
Low critic score / high audience score = Maybe fun but forgettable movie
I feel pretty confident that Captain Marvel, Emilia Perez, Spy Kids, Sausage Party, The Last Jedi, and Ghostbusters 2016 aren't at much risk of going over the heads of audiences, but you're entitled to your opinion if you think they count as avant garde cinema
Hey it's a heuristic so ymmv
"politically motivated reviews"
> Humanity Has Stopped Producing Bad Art: After a century of trial and error, mankind has perfected the art of cinema, as proven by recent masterworks like Cats, Space Jam: A New Legacy, the live-action Snow White, Red One, and Joker: Folie à Deux. Critics, who were once joyless automatons thriving on takedowns of human creativity, now bask in this golden age of moviemaking, lavishing praise upon the timeless artistry of The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros. Discovery.
This really should appear in professional film reviews.
> To account for this influx of reviewers, Rotten Tomatoes has created a "Top Critic" designation reserved for established media outlets, such as The New York Times and The Atlantic. However, this label has no special bearing on a film's top-line Tomatometer score and is largely incorporated into ancillary aspects of the site.
Just last night, I noticed that I could access the two percentage scores for critic reviews.
If you go to "https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_dilemma", and click on the critic reviews percentage (25%), you get a popup that lets you select between seeing the All Critics score (25%) and Top Critics score (28%).
(And if I'd thought to check Rotten Tomatoes first, when selecting what looked like a fun light comedy on Netflix, I wouldn't have wasted an hour of my life before I said WTF, checked RT, and continued to be in a bad mood.)
Incidentally, I'd love to have the Tomatometer score integrated into my UI for video streaming services. The services seem to instead like to use their own very generous scoring instead. (When they show any score at all. Some like to suppress the ratings for new shows they produced, presumably to avoid shooting down their own poor shows before people watch them by default.) But Rotten Tomatoes is a much better predictor of how I'll like a show than the streaming service scores are. But maybe the streaming services don't want to expose that the majority of the movies and series offered at any time now range from mediocre to outright bad.
>> But maybe the streaming services don't want to expose that the majority of the movies and series offered at any time now range from mediocre to outright bad.
There is no "now" necessary in that sentence.
All media production in all eras is mostly terrible. Music wasn't better in the 80s, or 70s, or 60s, its just that the 80s music you hear today is heavily curated to the good stuff.
It seems like streaming has made it worse, but only because you're watching so much more. In the past movies took effort to watch. You went to the cinema, or video shop. By the time they made it to TV they were curated, or at the very least you knew about them.
There was plenty of dross that made it direct to video that never made it to cinema or TV. (In 1989 I lived for a year at a place with no broadcast TV. We watched 2 videos a night from the local blockbuster-type store. They had a LOT of very crap movies.
To blame streamers for delivering a lot of mediocre content is to miss the root cause. Most new content is mediocre. Or bad. It has always been the way. Streaming just makes it easier to watch.
Rotten Tomatoes licensing for a major streaming platform would probably be millions of dollars a year.
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/4649rw/comment/d03a...
I am doing my movie selection via Plex, which has both tomatoes' and IMDb scores in the movie description
You guys are opening yourself to manipulation. Why not just be open for surprises? That’s what I do. Most of the time it’s bad surprises, but the occasional masterpiece that everyone else seems to hate make up for it. I do seem to not have the same taste as most people writing reviews though. I almost always find other people’s opinions ludicrous.
Power to you, but you probably miss out on masterpieces in the other direction though. The ones you would be more likely to watch if you spent more time watching those 'conventionally' liked movies, given the limit of time.
I read some of the IMDb reviews and a person making a case for a film with a low score can tip the scales for me.
I appreciate the sentiment, but time in life is limited. Streaming is 95% slop so it really does pay to let others curate you the best films, with tolerance for a lower rating if it's a genre you particularly like.
Jellyfin also has this
I will say that when I used to go to the theaters, which was before the pandemic and I started a family I used metacritic.
I found that any time I went to something that was red, I absolutley regretted it and it was terrible. Yellow was more hit or miss and top green scores were pretty good.
Exceptions were comedy where a lower score could still mean a good film, and politics oriented films, where a bad film with a media approved message could get a really good score even if it sucked.
It’s sad to not get a reliable indicator of that and someone should just resurrect the old score and call it Bad Apples. Since the actual score seems transparent, why not develop a competitor.
Theaters still exist you should go back. I go two or three times a month. If your kid is 4 or older they’ll have a great time. It’s good and healthy to get out of the house!
Some genres just don't track well with critic metrics
Regardless of the introduction of sycophantic reviewers, the 3/5 = fresh thing has always been a pretty half-ass threshold imo, and that a fact that a film can be "100% fresh" on RT on the basis of every single reviewer saying "yeah it's nothing special but it's fine, 3 stars" is fairly easy to misinterpret.
I think it's fine as a metric if you read it correctly.
100% means a film is extremely agreeable with whatever audience it has managed to get to. For major releases this can ultimately mean it's actually lacking anything particularly bold or interesting. This results in things like Frost/Nixon or Knives Out having higher ratings than broadly acclaimed films like Mulholland Drive or even There Will Be Blood; I know which ones I'd be more likely to put on with my extended family even if I don't especially like them.
But yeah, it's amazing how many people still don't grasp it after decades of getting angry about it.
Yeah. Pixar movies are often close to 100%. IMDb ratings are usually far more reasonable.
a mean rating of 3 can only be 100% fresh if the variance is 0
That is what "every single reviewer saying '[...] 3 stars'" means, yeah.
Yeah and his point is that's never going to happen lol. People bring up the 100% point a lot and it's a bit silly because a movie with a significant number of ratings is never going to have that kind of distribution.
That's why it's always a hypothetical never backed with actual examples. It's one of those things that sounds plausible until you look at the numbers. Movies close to 100% have pretty high average scores and Movies with majority 3/5's are nowhere near 100%.
Yeah 100% for RT doesn't mean 10/10, but that's it.
It’s just not true in practice: it’s pretty typical to find films with high rotten tomatoes scores and not very high metacritic scores; rotten tomatoes scores are pretty much useless unless you are not very discerning.
Examples:sovereign, how to make a million…, count of monte cristo, etc
Yes it's just true in practice.
Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are not the same site and have different audiences. Even the most popular movies will barely scrap 60 reviewers on Metacritic.
Comparing them directly is meaningless. Unfortunately they removed the average score for critics percentage but it's still there for the audience percentage.
You're also just wrong. Those movies, especially the last two have high Metacritic scores.
> Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are not the same site and have different audiences.
Yes we are talking about aggregating critic reviews. It's true if you like what the mass audience likes you'll be fine with any kind of crude measure like rotten tomatoes (although you'll still be better off with IMDB scores).
> Even the most popular movies will barely scrap 60 reviewers on Metacritic.
If you are talking about critic reviews there really aren't that many movie critics and you don't need that many. If you are talking about user reviews that isn't what the site is geared for (and not what the users of the site want either, just go to IMDB).
> You're also just wrong. Those movies, especially the last two have high Metacritic scores.
75 is not a high metacritic score, not just in absolute terms, but particularly not relative to the (ridiculous) 97% of rotten tomatoes.
If you only want to watch a few movies a year (and presumably want them to be the "best") Metacritic is the only useful site (with the provisos that someone else posted about political films and modulating for your own personal preferences).
>If you are talking about critic reviews there really aren't that many movie critics and you don't need that many.
RT still amasses a few hundred critics, and yes it matters statistically because scores will almost certainly decrease (or at the least be unstable) with more reviews until a statically significant threshold. Below hundred isn't it and a score based on 10 ratings is nigh useless.
>75 is not a high metacritic score, not just in absolute terms, but particularly not relative to the (ridiculous) 97% of rotten tomatoes.
Yes it's a high score. Have you taken a look at what kind of range best picture nominees fall at ? 75 is a high score. We've already established a 97% doesn't mean 9.7/10. Doesn't mean your contrived examples are a reality. I'm sure you can do arithmetic and see what a 3/5 falls to over 10.
> RT still amasses a few hundred critics, and yes it matters statistically because scores will almost certainly decrease (or at the least be unstable) with more reviews until a statically significant threshold.
There aren't a hundred critics worth counting, it's just garbage in garbage out; I don't want every-person-with-a-substack's review, I want the dozen or so top film critics.
> Below hundred isn't it and a score based on 10 ratings is nigh useless.
It really isn't. Metacritic top movies for each year are indicative of the "quality" movies, as you would expect the average of the top 10 movie critics to be.
> Yes it's a high score. Have you taken a look at what kind of range best picture nominees fall at ? 75 is a high score.
No, for this year alone (which is only part way through) there are 68 movies with a score above 75 on Metacritic. If you were watching movies according to score alone that mean you would have to watch more than 8 movies a month just to get to those films (and that's if you refuse to watch movies from any other year).
> We've already established a 97% doesn't mean 9.7/10
We've established that the number is not very useful, far less useful than a 9.7/10 type score is.
Look no one is going to stop you from using Rotten Tomatoes if it meets your needs. For me and many other people who don't have time or desire to watch films below a certain quality we need an actual estimate of a quality score, which Rotten Tomatoes doesn't provide and Metacritic does.
>There aren't a hundred critics worth counting, it's just garbage in garbage out; I don't want every-person-with-a-substack's review, I want the dozen or so top film critics.
This is an argument against aggregation itself, not for Metacritic over RT. If you only trust a dozen specific critics, you should just read them directly. The entire purpose of an aggregator is to gather a wide sample to smooth out individual biases. That's the opposite of 'garbage in garbage out'. If your sample isn't wide as an aggregator, that's a minus no matter how you spin it.
>No, for this year alone... there are 68 movies with a score above 75 on Metacritic.
This is a nonsensical argument. By this logic, if we have a phenomenal year for film where 100 movies get a score over 75, the score itself becomes less valid? A score's meaning is relative to the scale, not the number of films that achieve it.
And Literally hundreds of movies are released every year. 8 a month is a tiny fraction of that.
Your personal viewing capacity doesn't change the fact that 75/100 is objectively a high score.
>We've established that the number is not very useful, far less useful than a 9.7/10 type score is.
No, you've asserted that. We've established they measure two different things. RT measures consensus (% of critics who liked it). Metacritic measures average intensity (a weighted average score). Both are useful. One tells you how many critics would recommend it, the other tells you how much they recommend it, on average. Claiming one is "not very useful" is just stating your personal preference as well as demonstrably false, as rotten tomatoes is very widely used.
> If you only trust a dozen specific critics, you should just read them directly
It's much quicker and easier to just get an aggregated Metascore, which takes a second (and allows you to go in blind). I don't have any desire to read 12 movie review articles for every movie ever released.
> The entire purpose of an aggregator is to gather a wide sample to smooth out individual biases.
The point is to get a useful number not to achieve some platonic ideal in statistics. Again there aren't 100 movies critics worth listening to and I am not looking for popular opinion. If you want popular opinion use IMDB ratings.
> This is a nonsensical argument. By this logic, if we have a phenomenal year for film where 100 movies get a score over 75, the score itself becomes less valid? A score's meaning is relative to the scale, not the number of films that achieve it.
Yes is some fantasy world where that happens you would be right. In the real world that doesn't happen. Even if it did happen many people still have time constraints and want to watch only the best X films a year and Metacritic is just better at doing that than Rotten Tomatoes is. As yet another example "Bob Trevino likes it" is 94 RT vs 70 MC compared with "Past Lives" 95 RT vs MC 94: Which is more informative when selecting a movie? I can list more examples but I can't find any examples that demonstrate the reverse (i.e. that shows that you would be better off listening to RT over MC).
> And Literally hundreds of movies are released every year. 8 a month is a tiny fraction of that. Your personal viewing capacity doesn't change the fact that 75/100 is objectively a high score.
"High score" is an arbitrary definition. For the purposes of the discussion, which is whether Metacritic is a better way to determine which movies to watch, 74 doesn't cross the threshold of worth watching (absent some other factor) unless you watch more than 8 movies a month (and only want to watch movies released this year).
> No, you've asserted that. We've established they measure two different things. RT measures consensus (% of critics who liked it). Metacritic measures average intensity (a weighted average score). Both are useful. One tells you how many critics would recommend it, the other tells you how much they recommend it, on average. Claiming one is "not very useful" is just stating your personal preference as well as demonstrably false, as rotten tomatoes is very widely used.
Again, it is not useful in the sense of choosing movies to watch if you are even mildly selective. I gave another example above showing why. It's true that many people don't care about that, they just want something that the average person finds entertaining for 1.5 hours, and Rotten Tomatoes is fine for that. If you have a quality threshold higher than that or would rather watch a better movie than a worse one then it isn't.
A movie with 100% on RT will never in practice get an average score of 6/10. This was the original point of contention. Nothing you've said so far has made this statement any less true, nor do you have any examples to refute it.
>It's much quicker and easier to just get an aggregated Metascore... I don't have any desire to read 12 movie review articles
So your argument against a broad-sample aggregator (RT) is to use a slightly-less-broad-sample aggregator (MC)? You complain about "every-person-with-a-substack" but you're still relying on an aggregation of dozens of critics you've never heard of. You're just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and calling it "quality."
>"High score" is an arbitrary definition. For the purposes of the discussion... 74 doesn't cross the threshold of worth watching
You're confusing your personal, subjective viewing threshold with an objective measure of quality. A score is what it is. 75/100 is the top quartile. That is, by definition, a high score. Whether you have enough time in your life to watch every movie in the top quartile is completely irrelevant to the validity of the score itself.
Now this is more besides the point but i really do think that you're using a tool (Metacritic's average score) for a job it wasn't designed for: being the sole arbiter of what's worth your time. A film's "quality" is not a single, objective number. It depends on genre, intent, and audience.
Is a 95-rated historical epic 'better' than the 'best' horror film of the year that only managed an 82 on Metacritic? Your system says yes, which is absurd. They're trying to do different things.
Not to mention your method is overly biased towards one specific type of film: the prestige drama. If that's the only kind of film you like to watch then cool i guess, but if not then what you're currently doing is nonsensical.
>As yet another example "Bob Trevino likes it" is 94 RT vs 70 MC compared with "Past Lives" 95 RT vs MC 94: Which is more informative when selecting a movie? I can list more examples but I can't find any examples that demonstrate the reverse (i.e. that shows that you would be better off listening to RT over MC).
Even the most well received movies have a few mixed, negative or less positive than the consensus reviews. You could well be one of them. So the RT score tries to answers the question..."What are the odds i'll like this movie?"
This is a very useful information to have especially because i'm not a zombie picking movies to watch because of a single average score from an echo chamber of critics (which is bizarrely what you seem to be doing).
If the synopsis of Bob Trevino is more interesting to me, I would absolutely pick it over Past Lives especially if the latter seems more divisive.
They are complementary scores. Only when two movies seem to be the same type of film with the same type of distribution of scores will i favor the average score.
> This was the original point of contention...
The original point of contention was that the "percent that approve" of the film that RT uses is surprising and not as useful as a regular rating system. (By the way the average score is now hidden on RT).
> So your argument against a broad-sample aggregator (RT) is to use a slightly-less-broad-sample aggregator (MC)?
My argument is to use useful aggregation of experts instead of a much less useful one.
> You complain about "every-person-with-a-substack" but you're still relying on an aggregation of dozens of critics you've never heard of.
I don't need to have "heard of them" to know that the NYT film critic, the reviewer at Siskel and Ebert and the film critic at Vanity Fair are probably more worth listening to than the "MacGuffin or Meaning Substack".
> You're just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and calling it "quality."
No, the opinions of the film critics for the top publications in the world are not arbitrary.
> You're confusing your personal, subjective viewing threshold with an objective measure of quality. A score is what it is. 75/100 is the top quartile. That is, by definition, a high score. Whether you have enough time in your life to watch every movie in the top quartile is completely irrelevant to the validity of the score itself.
Beside the fact that the rating isn't the percentile ranking of film the entire point of the discussion is which site better helps you choose films. Again the definition of "high score" is completely arbitrary and irrelevant.
> Now this is more besides the point but i really do think that you're using a tool (Metacritic's average score) for a job it wasn't designed for: being the sole arbiter of what's worth your time. A film's "quality" is not a single, objective number. It depends on genre, intent, and audience.
I never said that. It's a helpful filtering mechanism. I watch low rated films if they are a genre I particularly like (just like I eat junk food without claiming that it is haute-cuisine) and I don't watch movies if they are not in a style I enjoy. Apropos of your example I don't like horror so I don't watch it, irrespective of the score.
> Not to mention your method is overly biased towards one specific type of film: the prestige drama. If that's the only kind of film you like to watch then cool i guess, but if not then what you're currently doing is nonsensical.
Most films are dramas as far as I know. In any case you can filter on categories so it's irrelevant.
> The RT score tries to answers the question..."What are the odds i'll like this movie?".
Well it's closer to what are the odds the average person will like it, which isn't what I want: I want 1. to be able to pick a better movie rather than a worse one and 2. be able to threshold on higher quality than the average person.
> This is a very useful information to have especially because i'm not a zombie picking movies to watch because of a single average score from an echo chamber of critics (which is bizarrely what you seem to be doing).
No one is doing this, they are using Metacritic as a starting point to filter and rank movies which, once again, RT doesn't do a good job at because of it's binary classifier system and inclusion of everyone under the sun.
> If the synopsis of Bob Trevino is more interesting to me, I would absolutely pick it over Past Lives. They are complementary scores.
That's fine and as I said something I and everyone else does, just like I eat junk food (and maybe sometimes actually prefer to some 3-star Michelin restaurant). The problem is pretending that those two films are roughly the same quality, or that because someone sometimes prefers a lower critic ranked movie that ratings don't matter: you can make the same argument about preferring a "rotten" RT movie.
You seem to be arguing in circles and are now actively misrepresenting my points to defend your own.
>The original point of contention was that the "percent that approve" of the film that RT uses is surprising and not as useful as a regular rating system.
No, the original point I was responding to was the tired, hypothetical claim that a movie could get "100% fresh" with every critic giving it a middling 3/5 stars. My point was that in practice, this never happens. You have provided zero evidence to the contrary and have now shifted the goalposts to a vague, subjective debate about "usefulness.". The original comment is right there. You can read.
>I don't need to have "heard of them" to know that the NYT film critic, the reviewer at Siskel and Ebert and the film critic at Vanity Fair are probably more worth listening to than the "MacGuffin or Meaning Substack".
This is just gatekeeping masquerading as an argument. They have more to say on the mechanics of film, not on what movies you'll think are the best. It's especially ridiculous when you realize that RT gets reviews from these 'top critics' and you can filter for them.
>The RT score tries to answers the question..."What are the odds the average person will like it"...
The RT percentage has a critics and top critics score so no it's not, not anymore than the metacritic score is 'the score the average person will give it'. That's not how statistics work.
>That's fine and as I said something I and everyone else does, just like I eat junk food (and maybe sometimes actually prefer to some 3-star Michelin restaurant). The problem is pretending that those two films are roughly the same quality, or that because someone sometimes prefers a lower critic ranked movie that ratings don't matter: you can make the same argument about preferring a "rotten" RT movie.
There's nothing to pretend. If i think it's better then it's better for me. What critics say doesn't matter. It's really sad that you apparently characterize movies you like with lower critic scores as 'junk food'. Have a mind of your own.
> You have provided zero evidence to the contrary and have now shifted the goalposts to a vague, subjective debate about "usefulness.". The original comment is right there. You can read.
I literally provided several examples of unreasonable/misleading scores (there isn't an API so this is the best you can do). You on the other hand haven't provided any examples to show when RT is more useful than MC. The context of the original criticism is that the RT score is misleading and less useful than an actual rating.
> This is just gatekeeping masquerading as an argument. They have more to say on the mechanics of film, not on what movies you'll think are the best. It's especially ridiculous when you realize that RT gets reviews from these 'top critics' and you can filter for them.
It's not gatekeeping to recognize that there are actual experts in matter of taste who are going to be way more informative than the average joe. The implication of your argument is that every jack-asses opinion is just as valuable. No one actually believes this. And I don't know how many times I need to say this but I don't want to read a dozen critic reviews, I want a summary statistic (so that you can get a rough ranking of movies).
> The RT percentage has a critics and top critics score so no it's not, not anymore than the metacritic score is 'the score the average person will give it'. That's not how statistics work.
The problem is that the summary statistic (even if the average score was still visible) on RT includes so many people that it is closer to average opinion than critic opinion. That's apart from the problem with hot-or-not binary classification.
> There's nothing to pretend. If i think it's better then it's better for me. What critics say doesn't matter. It's really sad that you apparently characterize movies you like with lower critic scores as 'junk food'. Have a mind of your own.
I have explicitly said that I don't dogmatically follow critic opinions (no one does). The point is the opinions have value as a starting point to filter/select films that is better than popular opinion or a binary thresholding type system.
Once again you can make your same argument against any rating system (IMDB, RT,e tc) and absurdly claim that if you use those as a starting point to select films that you don't "have a mind of your own". In fact you can do this for ratings of any product or service and make the absolutely trivial point that a person's personal preferences or situation can deviate from consensus expert rankings. It's silly to then conclude that one ranking system can't be better than another or that popular opinion is equally valuable compared to expert opinion.
Weirdly I often find films with an RT score in the range of 40% to 60% with high-ish IMDB scores to be the most interesting.
Whereas an RT 90%+ score without IMDB/Metacritic consensus the film is good typically means its mass-produced common denominator Hollywood slop.
Wouldn't we expect the most truly mediocre movies to have the lowest variance in opinions?
That might be why the Marvel movies score so highly.
Maybe the rating system should be changed from fresh and rotten into clonally propagated and heirloom to reflect this nuance
Yeah, I'd love a personalised Tomatometer. I'd only get out of bed for something 4 stars (8/10) or above, so I'd love to know the percentage of audience/reviewers that scored like that.
This would also give "cult classics" and interesting/creative films that are more love-it-or-hate-it a bit more of an edge in ratings over the lukewarm Marvel slop we see these days.
I find IMDb better than RT. RT even though it has an Audience score. It tends to give priority to the Critics' score, which in most cases we know is influential in one way or another.
IMDb score doesn't rely on a group of people, but on all users. It may give a little more weightage to the US users, but that's fine. Its top movies and TV shows make a lot more sense, unlike RT.
Tangentially related : It is possible to deanonymize users from kaggle dataset or netflix competition.
https://medium.com/@EmiLabsTech/data-privacy-the-netflix-pri...
Compared to the example of the medical records, Netflix had been very careful not to add any data that could identify a user, like zip-code, birthdate, and of course name, personal IDs, etc. Nevertheless, only a couple of weeks after the release, another PhD student, Arvind Narayanan, announced that they (together with his advisor Vitaly Shmatikov), had been able to connect many of the unique IDs in the Netflix dataset to real people, by cross referencing another publicly available dataset: the movie ratings in the IMDB site, where many users post publicly with their own names.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf
https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2018/project/Archie-Gers...
I agree. I stopped relying on RT scores years ago. There are far fewer occasions when the audience score doesn't align with my preferences. Today I am so far away from most critics in taste and preference, it's like they live on another planet.
There are many metrics that can be sampled, many challenges to normalization.
eg: https://ext.to/browse/?sort=seeds&order=desc&cat=1&q=2019
is a listing of 2019 movie torrents ranked by seeds (number of clients holding full copies of a torrent version).
A normalization challenge is to group torrent variations (1080p rips and 720p rips and WEB-DL's and BluRay and etc.) and tally up and rank interest in various films over time.
Clearly Ne Zha (2019), a Chinese Animation, Fantasy, Adventure movie was a global pirate star of that year .. should it be "normalized" by population of country of origin to smooth out the home team having a billion+ in population "bias" ?
One advantage of ranking films by year and pirate copies is it provides a pragmatic measure of "staying power"
https://ext.to/browse/?sort=seeds&order=desc&cat=1&q=1964
My Fair Lady, Dr Strangelove, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Mary Poppins, A Fistful of Dollars, and Goldfinger are still being hoarded 60 years after their release.
* https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/615453
* https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ne_zha
I just attend my local independent cinema. Sometimes I’m blown away. Sometimes the film sucks, but there are only 3-4 options at any given time. Simplifies the decision, and at the very least, they serve beer.
I only rely on IMDb scores and they're still reliable if enough time has passed since the movie release. A movie with more than 6 avg is usually enjoyable, while below 6 is not worth watching. Over 7 is usually very good, over 8 is a masterpiece
I agree wholeheartedly. What none of the review sites have figured out is how to adjust TV show user scores so that they don't score so much higher than movies.
It’s interesting that people pay close attention to one-size-fits all number (regardless of the pros and cons of the methodology used to derive said number). I find RT really useful for collating the reviews from “top” reviewers in one place: over the years, I know how my interests align with the tastes of particular reviewers, and I don’t have to look in multiple places to get a snapshot view of their opinions.
The idea that something like a movie's "good"-ness (or whatever) could be measured accurately, reliably or even usefully, by experts or laypeople, should be absurd on its face to any right-thinking person.
What a movie does or does not do for you will depend on a host of things which couldn't possibly be blamed on the movie itself - there's no objective experience of a movie.
The lighting, what you had for dinner, the comfort of your chair, if the baby starts crying, who you're with in the room, how they're feeling, whether you actually really have time for a movie or should be doing something else, if you're 16 and just had your first break up 3 days before, whether you saw the original movie 30 years ago or totally missed the boat, if you've smoked a few spliffs with your friends in the car in the parking lot of the cinema beforehand, etc etc.
People who think differently are, I think, simply going along with a very peculiar recent trend.
It's a general effect the Internet has had on our aesthetics. We no longer think our experience matters or even really exists, instead we think our take on the thing in its social context amongst all the other people's takes is all that matters and exists.
Liking something means liking it exactly how the average person liked it, and sharing a "take" means describing how we deviated, ever so slightly, from the agreed-upon-reading of the agreed-upon-thing. In reality, if you watch a movie ten times, you've had ten different experiences. If one hundred people watch a movie, there have been one hundred different experiences.
It's a great shame that we've forgotten this fact, and lost ourselves in a culture of "reacting".
There's truth to that, but the vast majority of people can figure out that a movie is bad, no matter what they had for dinner or what's going on in their lives.
We're not looking for the Platonic form of the movie review, but just a simple "Is this movie trash? Is it amazing?" aggregated reaction from viewers.
It's simple: When there's money to be made, the folks with the money to make, will pull out the stops to game the reviews. We have seen this in just about every review system ever (except Consumer Reports). They game it, milk some money, until everyone figures out it sucks, then abandon it. The reviewers count on getting brought.
I really miss Mr. Cranky[0, 1]. Here's his review of Battlefield Earth[2]:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Cranky
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20120503072554/http://www.mrcrank...
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20120926010236/http://www.mrcrank...
I've always found IMDBs rating to be far far better.
Anything that's 7+ is generally good, anything below that is flawed. The Tomato meter just comes off as random and an unreliable indicator for me.
Yes I was going to say something similar. I often use a blend on IMDb score and rotten tomatoes to judge whether I should watch a movie.
The only thing I will say is that IMDB scores are also (likely) gamed by movie studios to artificially inflate their scores. You also need to be careful with certain genres and series on IMDB that attract positive ratings from the archetypal IMDB user. This is why marvel movies and such receive such sky high ratings.
Basically if the movie is not a mainstream superhero type blockbuster full of cgi you can use the IMDB score if your judgement
Rotten Tomatoes is the First Past the Post of movie reviews. Incredibly distorted and unreliable in capturing the sentiment of the majority.
Obvious to anyone using the site or aware of is ratings, including the author, but it is good to see some analysis as evidence.
I still miss the times when I would decide to watch a movie based on the cover at the VHS store or based on a recommendation. Much faster, way more serendipity.
Netflix shows movie posters and Reddit has recommendation threads.
Exactly the same thing
Its not just Rotten Tomatoes, the vast majority of so called "Reviews" the average consumer sees these days are being manipulated in service of corporate interests.
Amazon's full of paid reviews for scam products, so called "Independent" review sites like Wirecutter are basically just advertorial hosting platforms now, or are even secretly owned by the companies who's products are being "Reviewed," 99% of YouTube reviews are nothing more than sponsored content that regurgitates press release talking points from companies who provide the reviewers free products, Google and Yelp reviews of local businesses have an entire manipulation industry built up around them (Just Google "Yelp review service" to see what I'm talking about," and the sad reality we live in now is most anywhere you go, most so called "Reviews" you see these days are either from bots or corporate shills.
We officially live in the "No trust" era and its only going to get so, so much worse from here.
Highly recommend MovieLens if you have eclectic or niche movie tastes. It can be a bit of a nerd-snipe though. One of my favorites activities is rating movies and watching the recommended ratings (what rating it thinks I'll give a movie) update overnight.
It's at the very least, better than average chance at predicting which movies you will like.
I would like to see the movies with the largest discrepancy between critic and audience score.
Edit: An example is Star Wars - The Last Jedi. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_last_jedi
Critic score: 91%
Audience score: 41%
Movie reviews (stars) given on Amazon Prime's streaming service always seemed incredibly sus. All the bad movies from the long-tail back catalog all seemed remarkably highly-rated. Typical pattern: Forth-rate sci-fi action movie amalgamation of the 12 other well-known sci-fi action hits? Yes!! Four stars!
Just assumed Prime's claimed ratings were untrustworthy and must be based on some corporate "we'll promote your dreck, no problem-o!" data feed. But a bit sadder that Rotten Tomatoes, once at least reasonably legit and crowd-sourced, now poisoned by the same "everything's good! watch it! watch it!" inflation. Not surprising. Anti-surprising, really. Still a bit sad.
Thank you for the excellent historical, statistical deep dive.
As a casual user of Rotten Tomatoes, I can't make any sense out of the ratings. They could be random.
The 'critic' ratings have no predictive power at all for me. The 'user' ratings have some value but not a whole lot.
In my experience of film reviews, Rotten Tomatoes high positive scores are not always representative of how entertaining some content will be.. However, the negative skew is almost always accurate for how bad something will be for all viewers.
The bimodal distribution of professional critics versus community opinions obviously describes what is happening behind the data. Recycled AstroTurf for 1980's cult films have little appeal to modern viewers even with maximal pandering for nostalgia.
Good Hollywood writers likely starved to death, and were replaced with LLM interpreted Nielsen Media Research data. Most video games offer better writing now... lol =3
Would there be some selection bias as well? As info about movies becomes readily available, generally the people who go see movies would have decided that they would probably enjoy said movie, and write favourable reviews
If they're actual movie reviewers then their job is to go see films regardless of whether they think they'd personally enjoy them. Some of the best reviews come from reviewers who have to go and see something they absolutely hate and would never go see for their own entertainment.
Fun fact. You can click into Popcornmeter and see verified audience reviews versus all reviews.
E.g. Audience who went to see 2025's Snow White loved it. Those who haven't seen it hated it. Who is more biased?
What really gets me is how effective the "Certified Fresh" badge still is, even for people who know the system is flawed
The one and only time I used the site, I discovered "Black Panther" was the number one movie of all time. Thats all the analysis I needed to reach a verdict.
I’ve always preferred Metacritic because it assigns a weighted average. RT only tells you the “approval rate,” the percentage of favorable ratings. I don’t care if 100% of critics and fans agreed it was better than total crap.
Seems like it's been common knowledge for a while that the critic reviews are useless, but the audience reviews are still valuable. You just have to make sure to actually look at the audience score.
I completely lost faith in Rotten Tomatoes after consistently seeing Marvel capeshit, including their worst slop, reliably get high audience and critical scores.
audience scores, as I view them, is very much an indicator of "did the marketing connect to the intended audience?"
A great movie that met the wrong audience, will reasonably get a low score.
That’s a pretty good point. Lots of films find an audience post marketing phase and have a long tail. If the marketing phase had connected better their tail might be shorter.
IMDB is my go-to, especially since users grade on "harsher" terms and anything >8 is considered amazing.
Interesting, over the past few years, I've ignored the critics score and just looked at the audience score - this explains why.
There needs to be a "score from people who produce scores like me" for everything. E.g. for coffee shops I really don't care if the staff are rude but I care if there are tables and it's clean and the WiFi is good.
I was thinking of having granular scoring e.g. having people rate WiFi, rate cleanliness etc but that won't work because people are lazy. So some kind of Amazon algorithm of "people who buy similar things" but for movie, cafe, etc ratings.
To bring it back on topic, for movies I care about good story and visuals but not so much how "woke or not" it is, I prefer if it's intelligent Vs dumb except if it's a comedy then dumb is fine, and so on.
I am very confused by the second chart (the bar chart). Shouldn't that be a scatter plot?
So, the best movie is the one we sell
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Its absolutely hopeless. The rankings are gamed because Rotten Tomato still carries some semblance of credibility (although in this post Trump winning era, sources of credibility can get eroded more quickly)
It does not get clearer than when a political movie comes out. 2018 was an interesting year, two movies came out that really allowed me to get a clearer picture of what was going on: "Knock Down The House" and "Death of a Nation".
When "Knock Down The House" (documentary featuring the leftwing US politician AOC) came out, I got interested in scraping the data off of Rotten Tomatoes and studying it.
Before making any moves, I first watched the movie for myself in a theater (and also got to see a live Q&A with the director to understand her thought process)
The movie had at the time a 100% rating from critics and ~80% from viewers. After watching it, I would concur with the viewer ranking but felt that the critic ranking was unusually high. Seriously? 100%? (It has now gone down to 99% but still). In regards to the viewer ranking I conceded that I was probably biased which is why I also ran this experiment on Death of a Nation (also saw in theaters but to a room with only one other moviegoer).
Knock Down the House eventually got featured on Tucker Carlson like a year after release(I think it coincided with Netflix making it free on youtube). I watched in realtime how the movie critic score kept going down and down and down to where it is now (11%). Dumping the scraped data, I ran a simple analysis and discovered a large portion of the people ranked it with no comments, or simplistic things like how stupid AOC is and many had had no other ratings other than this movie or the only other film is the one featuring Illhan Omar (another politician hated by the right).
For Death of a nation, the scores were flipped. A whopping 0% in the critic score(12 reviews) while the user score stood at a respectable 87% (again at the time when I did my scraping yet again we saw tons of 1 movie reviewers). Yeah the movie royally sucked and was painful to watch but 0%? That was a bit fishy. This essentially killed any credibility that I had in Rotten Tomatoes.
I started to trust places like /r/movies and /r/AMCsAList only to get burned by that as well when movies recommended in the comments would end up being terrible and then when I went back to criticize the films, I would get criticized and downvoted to non visible status. It was not a definite signal but gave me the feeling that there is a lot of astroturfing going on there as well.
Furthermore, these movies promoted on Reddit would typically be in 3/5 range on Rotten tomatoes which further made me think there is no real way to get a real signal if a film is likely to be good or not.
What I started to do was not a great metric but has helped cut down on the cruft: Follow specific actors/directors I really liked and ones that I felt were in it to make good films. As an example, actresses like Mary Elizabeth Winstead have turned down big roles in favor of indie films or other interesting scripts to the detriment of her career but the films have been more enjoyable and interesting. In each film I also find other actors to follow and if I start to see more studio promotion of a specific person (for example Anya Taylor Joy after The Queens Gambit) I start to caution away and sometimes just drop that actor from the list. In her case I stuck to films she worked with other people that I determined I liked(like Edgar Wright) before feeling like there is too much promotion going on and just dropping her from the list. Other than this, I fill out my list with franchises I like or subjects that I always give a chance to (science/space, etc.).
I know I am leaving out a lot of potential good films but the noise has become unbearable to the point where I don't want to waste my time anymore.
A few years later Rotten Tomatoes introduced "Verified Reviews". I thought this will be amazing as now it will only include people with skin in the game (ie. verified to have paid for a ticket)...except now this has been completely hijacked as well.
Going back to the example of political films now what the right wing does is they have a billionaire finance a film through some intermediary group then free tickets to the movie are given out at conservative events. People books seats to the movie, promote it on social media, post a "Verified Review" and then often don't show up to the screening. I have discovered sold out screenings to some of these movies but when I went to the theater to see some other film, i'd often peek into the screening of these films only to find they are almost empty. The movie plays regardless of if someone shows up or not. Furthermore some of these films actually have a code that they show at the end of the film to gift a free ticket to a friend so the box office numbers of these films are inflated and its all a bunch of hogwash.
Like I said its hopeless. In a way we saw the rise of this new fake world play out in Hollywood before it took over social media and the rest of the internet now. How will it end? People trusting only what they already know they like or from trusted friends and everything else is ignored.
This article has got me thinking of an interesting idea though: What if we go and determine which of the critics are known to provide reviews that reflect our tastes (maybe by reading reviews of movies that we enjoyed), then pull only those review data and compute a new Tomato score based only on those critics? We could toss the Rotten Tomatoes tomato meter in the trash and get back to a legitimate review that you could use as a positive signal again.
RottenTomatoes has been rotten for over a decade. IMDB user ratings are much more useful, but still far from perfect.
IMDB also had a ratings inflation of about 0.5 points about the same time (anecdata), where movies over 5.5 were watchable back then. Now a 6.0+ demarcates a watchable movie. Or my threshold changed in the past 10 years or so...
Stopped reading when I saw a bar chart being used for correlating critic and audience scores.
It's not the best way to visualise a correlation, I agree, but the article is interesting and full of valuable information, so why stop reading?
You don't need to comment if you didn't read.