Are reviews ‘fake news’?
“What other wide release with a (Tomatometer) score under 8% has opened north of $20m? I don’t think there is one,” said Josh Greenstein, president of worldwide marketing and distribution at Sony, when Mcclintock interviewed him. He sounded as proud as a farmer who had just sold a poke full of pigs to an unsuspecting butcher.
Greenstein may not have taken into full account the desperation of parents eager to distract kids. And he might find his enthusiasm has dropped as vertiginously as The Emoji Movie’s box-office numbers, which by Monday had plunged by more than 50%, indicating cataclysmic word of mouth.
Sony’s following a similar playbook with The Dark Tower, hoping to beat discouraging reviews to the punch with the names of Stephen King, Idris Elba and Matthew Mcconaughey. (With 20 critics reporting, the sci-fi fantasy had earned a 20% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a green splat.)
Studios have always tried to outrun bad review, most recently by organising their business model around “critic-proof” adaptations of comic books, toys, games and now iphone apps, certain that the core audiences for those properties would turn out in droves regardless.
But no sooner had Hollywood doubled down on that strategy than it started to fail, with such bombs as John Carter, Battleship and The Lone Ranger or, this year, Baywatch, The Mummy and the latest Pirates of the Caribbean and Transformers movies. Did bad reviews – or their cumulative throw-weight on aggregation sites such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic – sink those movies? Studio marketers may do all they can to blame their failures on critics, bypassing the “fake news” of poor notices with TV ad campaigns. But it’s more likely audiences simply saw dreck for what it was.
Today, reviewing is a companionate enterprise, with critics and “civilians” engaging in a dialogue.
After all, every film-goer deserves a healthy, well-balanced movie diet – no one can survive on overripe tomatoes and pigs from a poke alone. – The Washington Post