Rotton Tomatoes has Hollywood terrified
The review website Rotten Tomatoes isn’t killing Hollywood: Hollywood is killing Hollywood, Sonny Bunch writes.
The most powerful people in Hollywood are not named Weinstein, do not have the power to greenlight films, and don’t have Brad Pitt on speed dial. They’re not rich and famous. They don’t throw bashes at Cannes or host cocktail parties during Oscar season.
No, the new Hollywood powerbrokers are a far simpler sort. You’ve probably never heard of most of them.
That’s right: The critics who make up Rotten Tomatoes are the biggest, baddest villains Hollywood has cooked up since Darth Vader (and I’m one of them). And just like Alderaan before it, La La Land may soon be space dust.
At least, that’s what the executives who talked to Brooks Barnes of The New York Times would have you believe. Sure, some of the movies were bad, a few execs were willing to admit. “But most studio fingers point toward Rotten Tomatoes, which boils down hundreds of reviews to give films ‘fresh’ or ‘rotten’ scores on its Tomatometer,” Barnes reported. Brett Ratner said at a festival last year that the review-aggregating site would be “the destruction of our business,” and the biz’s brightest lights seem to agree with the director of Rush Hour 3 and producer of Santa’s Slay.
“Mr. Ratner’s sentiment was echoed almost daily in studio dining rooms all summer, although not for attribution, for fear of giving Rotten Tomatoes more credibility,” Barnes wrote. “Over lunch last month, the chief executive of a major movie company looked me in the eye and declared flatly that his mission was to destroy the review-aggregation site.”
Moviemakers registering complaints about the power of the critical corps is nothing new, of course. In his Complete History of American Film Criticism, Jerry Roberts highlights the growing power of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel in the 1980s and the angst that caused with filmmakers. “Hand in hand with success was a power unprecedented in film criticism,” Roberts wrote. “Siskel and Ebert go, ‘Horrible picture,’ and I’m telling you, (they) can definitely kill a movie,” Eddie Murphy said in 1987.
Conversely, the duo is credited with “saving” small films that were lagging at the box office. Tom Sherak, a top executive at 20th Century Fox, once called a thumbs-up from Siskel and Ebert “the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for movies.”
The Tomatometer is something like a hyperpowered version of Ebert and Siskel’s patented thumbs up/thumbs down rating system. The site arguably has an even greater reach than the duo from Chicago: Barnes notes that Rotten Tomatoes drew 13.6 million unique visitors in May, while Roberts wrote that Siskel and Ebert drew “between eight and 11 million viewers a week” at their peak. Certainly this fully operational film criticism station has the power to destroy the hopes and dreams of wide-eyed dreamers working at studios who just want to provide audiences with a modicum of entertainment in the form of fivequels to Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean, right?
Well, no.
In a study published on Medium, Yves Bergquist, the director of the Data & Analytics Project at USC’s Entertainment Technology Center, rather thoroughly demolished the idea that negative scores from Rotten Tomatoes are having a negative effect on box office totals. Bergquist found nearly no correlation between overall grosses and RT scores and an even lower correlation between RT scores and opening weekend figures — arguably the time when critical opinion should have the greatest impact on box office totals, since potential audiences have little to go on by way of word of mouth from friends or coworkers.
The real reason for Hollywood’s woes seems much simpler: Audiences are bored. Bergquist gets at this when he notes that CGI-heavy efforts are seeing diminishing returns at the box office. But it’s not just the influx of spectacle: It’s the reduction of ideas.
This summer has been an endless river of sequels to franchises that should be dead (the aforementioned Transformers and Pirates movies; another Fast and Furious flick; another Alien movie) and the attempted birthing of franchises that have no reason to exist (The Mummy; Baywatch; Kong: Skull Island). Audiences don’t mind spectacle or franchises, so long as they are accompanied by solid storytelling.
It’s easy to blame Rotten Tomatoes. It’s harder to make a movie people want to see.