Studios have themselves to blame for this summer’s poor box office.

STUDIOS CAN ONLY BLAME THEMSELVES FOR THIS SUMMER’S LACKLUSTRE BOX OFFICE RESULTS

For much of cinematic history, movie studios have insisted that the choices they make — which filmmakers are attached to projects, which scripts get the green light — are a matter of giving the people what they want.

But let’s just go through the checklist to be sure: No one wants to see people of colour in the movies, they say, because they do poorly at the box office (false). No one wants to see women headline a superhero movie because men won’t go to see them (false). No one wants to see a movie if the critics have panned it (false, with prejudice).

Plenty a study and several recent blockbuster movies (The Fate of the Furious, Wonder Woman, etc.) have proven that men and women of all colours show up to the theatre to see diverse casts. And although audiences and the critics are two very separate domains, they aren’t different animals altogether.

But after a record-breaking poor summer for movies (from The Emoji Movie to The Hitman’s Bodyguard) and their respective box office totals, the studios have this year decided to place the blame on critics, but more specifically, Rotten Tomatoes, a website that aggregates film reviews and their respective ratings via something called a Tomatometer (which also uses a thumbs up-thumbs down scale). The website is owned by ticket-buying site Fandango, which displays the Tomatometer alongside listings.

In order to avoid the squash of the tomato, studios have shamelessly attempted to manipulate releases to their advantage, whether that’s by selectively previewing movies to critics they know will give it a more positive critique or cancelling early screenings for films unlikely to receive critical adulation.

In the New York Times this week, Rotten Tomatoes’ vicepresident Jeff Voris defended his Tomatometer, by saying, “I actually think it’s the opposite of simplified. It’s incredibly layered.” He believes its use of review pull-quotes, for example, do offer more information for viewers, while studios feel a fresh/ rotten icon just makes it too easy for them to click on a review and make a hasty decision.

If the complaints of studios sound like a reach, you’re not wrong. In fact, according to a new study by Data And Analytics Project director Yves Bergquist at USC’s Entertainment Technology Center, via Variety, “Rotten Tomatoes scores have never played a very big role in driving box office performance, either positively or negatively.”

Bergquist based his conclusions on releases from the last 17 years, also finding that critics actually aren’t tougher on big-budget blockbusters, which themselves don’t typically translate to stellar box office numbers. But his smoking gun is this: the film critic presents no threat to box office, because on average, they aren’t more negative than the average viewer. Actually, the average viewer is simply getting better at determining whether movies are good or bad.

So when they see a commercial of a Baywatch remake with The Rock running topless across their screen, or Tom Cruise also running — but with his shirt on — for The Mummy, they know they’re seeing a preview for a very bad movie.

But while audiences getting smarter may be a great thing for art and cinema in general, not so for studios whose bottom line is not based on a cleverer-than-thou viewer, but on filling seats for just about every cheap idea that makes it way across their desk.

According to The A.V. Club, this year’s summer box office totals are the lowest in 15 years. But that isn’t the result of harsh criticism, but rather, the eagerness with which studios give the green light to a franchise, sequel or remake if its been proven successful before, rather than take a risk on originality.

The films to earn the highest scores on Rotten Tomatoes and bring in a healthy box office this summer include interracial romantic-comedy The Big Sick, the soundtrack-driven Baby Driver and Christopher Nolan’s visual epic Dunkirk. The entire top 20 is comprised of diverse casts, original concepts and, yes, some big budgets.

The key has been fresh storytelling.

So while director Brett Ratner might believe Rotten Tomatoes has single-handedly led to “the destruction of our business,” it’s actually the business that’s been imploding all on its own, choosing a gradually lazier approach to filmmaking that banks on equally lazy and dim viewers.

Why not aim higher and allow them to rise to the occasion? Cinema began as an innovative art form, and there’s no reason to squander the boundless creative of such a platform, especially when you can profit in more ways than one off of offering something more.

So here’s some simple advice for the studios: make better movies, and maybe stop looking for someone else to blame.

UNIVERSAL STUDIOS When the average viewer sees a commercial with Tom Cruise running in a movie like The Mummy, they know they are seeing a preview for a bad movie, Sadaf Ahasan writes.