No fresh ratings for Rotten Tomatoes
Three biggest theatre chains report market value losses of about $4B (U.S.) since May
LOS ANGELES— Hollywood had a horrible summer.
Between the first weekend in May and Labour Day, a sequel-stuffed period that typically accounts for 40 per cent of annual ticket sales, box-office revenue in North America totalled $3.8 billion (U.S.), a15-per-cent decline from the same span last year. To find a slower summer, you would have to go back 20 years.
Business has been so bad that America’s three biggest theatre chains have lost roughly $4 billion in market value since May.
Ready for the truly alarming part? Hollywood is blaming a website: Rotten Tomatoes.
“I think it’s the destruction of our business,” Brett Ratner, the director, producer and film financier, said at a film festival this year.
Some studio executives privately concede that a few recent movies — just a few — were simply bad.
Flawed marketing may have played a role in a couple of other instances, they acknowledged, along with competition from Netflix and Amazon.
But most studio fingers point toward Rotten Tomatoes, which boils down hundreds of reviews to give films “fresh” or “rotten” scores on its Tomatometer. The site has surged in popularity, attracting 13.6 million unique visitors in May, a 32per-cent increase above last year’s total for the month, according to the analytics firm comScore.
Studio executives’ complaints about Rotten Tomatoes include the way its Tomatometer hacks off critical nuance, the site’s seemingly loose definition of who qualifies as a critic and the spread of Tomatometer scores across the web.
Last year, scores started appearing on Fandango, the online movie ticket-selling site, leading to grousing that a rotten score next to the purchase button was the same as posting this message: You are an idiot if you pay to see this movie.
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. One chief executive of a major movie company said flatly that his mission was to destroy the review-aggregation site.
Paramount’s Baywatch bombed after arriving to a Tomatometer score of 19, the percentage of reviews the movie received that the site considered positive (36 out of 191).
Doug Creutz, a media analyst at Cowen and Co., wrote of the film in a research note, “Our high expectations appear to have been crushed by a19 Rotten Tomatoes score.”
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword got a Tomatometer score of 28 — anything less than 60 is marked rotten — and audiences stayed away.
After costing Warner Bros. at least $175 million to make, the movie took in $39 million at the U.S. box office. In total.
How did a clunky website that has been around for 19 years amass such power?
The 36 people who work for Rotten Tomatoes hardly seem like industry killers. The site’s staff includes people such as Jeff Voris, an easygoing former Disney executive with greying hair who oversees operations, and Timothy Ryan, a former newspaper reporter who is a Rotten Tomatoes senior editor and lists Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide as favourite reading.
Jeff Giles, a 12-year Rotten Tomatoes veteran, writes what the site calls Critics Consensus, a one-sentence summary of the response to each film. (Disney’s latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie was summarized as proving “that neither a change in directors nor an undead Javier Bardem is enough to drain this sinking franchise’s murky bilge.”)
“Everyone here sweats the details every day,” said Paul Yanover, the president of Fandango, which owns Rotten Tomatoes. “Because we are serious movie fans ourselves, our priority — our entire focus — is being as useful to fans as we absolutely can be.” Hold on a minute. Fandango? Yes. In an absurdist plot twist, Rotten Tomatoes is owned by film companies. Fandango, a unit of NBCUniversal, which also owns Universal Pictures, has a 75-per-cent stake, with the balance held by Warner Bros. Fandango bought control from Warner last year for an undisclosed price. (All parties insist that Rotten Tomatoes operates independently.)
Yanover said it was silly for studios to make Rotten Tomatoes a box-office scapegoat.
“There is no question that there is some correlation to box-office performance — critics matter — but I don’t think Rotten Tomatoes can definitively make or break a movie in either direction,” he said. “Anyone who says otherwise is cherry-picking examples to create a hypothesis.” He cited Wonder Woman, which was the No. 1 movie of the summer, with $410 million in ticket sales. It was undoubtedly helped by a strong Tomatometer score of 92.
Dunkirk, Spider-Man: Homecoming and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 all received high scores and drew huge crowds. Other films did not do well on the Tomatometer ( The Hitman’s Bodyguard, The Emoji Movie) but still managed to find audiences.
Some filmmakers complain bitterly that Rotten Tomatoes casts too wide a critical net. The site says it works with some 3,000 critics worldwide, including bloggers and YouTube-based pundits. But should reviewers from Screen Junkies and Punch Drunk Critics really be treated as the equals of those from the Los Angeles Times and the New Yorker?
Yanover rejected those complaints, pointing to the site’s posted requirements. (“Online critics must have published no less than 100 reviews across two calendar years at a single, Tomatometer-approved publication,” for instance.) He also noted that critics at traditional outlets tended to be white men and that Rotten Tomatoes wanted to include female and minority voices.
‘Incredibly layered’ process
For the studios, the question of how individual reviews get classified as fresh or rotten is also a point of contention. Only about half of critics self-submit reviews and classifications to the site. Rotten Tomatoes staffers comb the web and pull the other half themselves. They then assign positive or negative grades.
“We have a well-defined process,” said Voris, the vice-president of Rotten Tomatoes. “Our curators audit each other’s work. If there is any question about how a review should be classified, we have three curators separate and do independent reads. If there still isn’t agreement, we call the journalist.”
Staff members also fact-check what critics have self-submitted. In one recent instance, a review of Alien: Covenant that was submitted as fresh seemed rotten. The site reversed the categorization after contacting the critic for clarification.
Voris brushed aside the studios’ protests — shared by many critics — that the Tomatometer ratings dam- age films because they reduce nuanced reviews to blunt scores.
“I actually think it’s the opposite of simplified,” Voris said. “It’s incredibly layered.”
Yes, the Tomatometer scores are the site’s best-known feature, he said. But Rotten Tomatoes also carries snippets of dozens of individual reviews. Beyond that, there are also links to full reviews. Still, it is the Tomatometer scores that have become ubiquitous across the web. Rotten Tomatoes makes money through partnerships with companies such as Apple, which lists the scores next to iTunes movie rentals and purchases.
And, to the dismay of movie marketers, Google has started to prominently display the scores even when users do not specifically search for them: Search the name of a film and the Tomatometer results pop up on the top right side of the results page, directly under the film’s poster.