IGN | Rotten Tomatoes Under Fire After PR Firm's Scheme to Pay Critics for Positive Reviews Uncovered
Rotten Tomatoes Under Fire After PR Firm's Scheme to Pay Critics for Positive Reviews Uncovered - IGN
IGN making this article is wild. I'm not accusing them of accepting literal money but come on lmao.
IGN: “Fifty dollars?! Have some fucking dignity. Our good reviews cost at least $200k”
It takes a thief to catch a thief
Yeah didn't they give the latest Battlefield 9/10 on release? 😂
I was thinking the same lol
Aren't they owned by the same company?
Not really. Up until recently, most of the MCU was good to great. I'm not exactly sure where the shift happened, but a lot of the more recent ones have been trash. I'm talking about the secret invasions and black widows, where they've completely lost the script.
After End Game was that shift. It felt like they told all there was to tell, and the stakes were gone. It peaked.
The peak is at whatever point you realized you had seen the same movie before.
Which is why RT scores were usually good. Because a RT percentage is just the percentage of critics that thought the film was good or better.
Too many people treat RT scores as a single "this is a film that has a quality rating of 90%" whereas it's "90% of critics think it's not shit".
Really, this is RTs fault for picking a metric so often used in a different way.
Yeah everyone knows if something is popular it sucks.
However entertaining and fun the MCU has been at times, I'd say they've clearly gotten away with a lot when it comes to movie making. Like there are plenty of films in that franchise/cinematic-universe that just wouldn't have cut it and would have died on the scrap heap as stand alone films. But the MCU glow kept them alive and folded them into the giant stream of MCU content.
Beyond that, I'd bet that the post-endgame stuff has been done objectively badly ... like you could break it down into a number of poor movie/franchise making choices (like you can't simply build a story out of "a multiverse", it isn't a character or plot idea, you need more). Love and Thunder was an awful film. Can anyone tell which characters are part of the story and which are being written out any more? Etc etc.
It's all still popular though. Beyond that, your argument is a strawman ... the MCU can be a give away (because, IMO, it has clearly made a number of missteps) without the question of popularity v quality being an issue.
The best part - Rotten Tomatoes can be manipulated by paying several people $50. Five Hamiltons.
I know reviewing movies doesn’t pay well, but I didn’t know it was that bad.
How many $50 reviewers did they have to buy though?
Looking at Ophelia... huh, it's not on Rotten Tomatoes anymore...
Well, looking at ANOTHER crappy Daisy Ridley movie, Chaos Walking:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chaos_walking
21% rating on 154 reviews.
So 32 positive reviews and 122 negative reviews.
To hit 60% they would need to add 151 positive reviews. 183/305 total reviews.
At $50 a pop, those 151 positive reviews would run $7,550. Chump change.
If you really want to get depressed research how much representatives and senators have been bought off with in the recent past.
Rotten tomatoes had nothing to do with this. They don’t even employ critics. They aggregate them and the PR firm was directly contacting reviewers.
If you think RT hasn't been in active incentive based collusion with studios and critic for years, you're the type of purposefully ignorant that advertisers make their bread and butter off of. RT was been corrupt since they sold out, and that was a very very very long time ago now.
They have been playing fast and loose with who qualifies as a professional reviewer allowing for increased manipulation.
They're saying their data is rotten.
Who would've thought that this was happening on a site with often massive disparities between Critic and Public reviews, almost always related to content with big marketing budgets.
The user reviews are where it’s at on rotten tomatoes. The critic reviews have been kinda suspect for a while.
the critic reviews have always been complete dogshit. too many movies get 100% or 0% on rotten tomatoes.
if i'm not mistaken IMDB ratings are only user based, and in my opinion, i almost never disagree with IMDB ratings and i think it's because it has a vastly larger voting group to get a more accurate viewer consensus even if a small number of critics give a 0/10 or 10/10
Good god has the world not figured this out already? Or was it a conspiracy theory until now?
Yeah no shit, RT end IMDb have been review shills for years, completely worthless
Yeah, I've seen it too. Anybody got good suggestions for alternatives?
Check out Letterboxd. But the star rating system is used a bit differently than you might be used to, like an average move will get a 3/5 stars, and that’s not a “bad” score. Just took me a bit getting used to
Forget aggregators. Find a couple critics you usually agree with. People have different tastes.
The issue is that every site uses the same critics to aggregate scores from. That being said I like using metacritic since you can view it by audience rating, and excluding the anti-woke, incel brigades on some media it usually aligns pretty well with what score I'd personally give a movie.
Uncovered? I thought it was public knowledge for years.
I always just assumed that the badly rated ones might be legit but that the higher ones may have had a few bought off critics (because capitalism) here and there, but now I know I'm right.
Anybody who hasn't noticed the change in recent years hasn't been paying attention.
Movie / TV reviews are such a shit show. I rarely find myself agreeing with the averaged out rating.
These days I’ll just make sure the rating is above say 30 and beyond that I’ll rely on trailers and reading actual reviews. But finding new movies and tv shows to watch is quite a chore as a result.
I hope someday soon AI can be employed to give you real personalized recommendations that don’t suck. But realistically it’ll just be more shitty algorithms meant to serve the interests of the highest bidder.
You either die a hero slowly becomes a villain
Anyone know of any good - maybe open source/federated - alternatives?
The problem is that any review aggregator is wide open to manipulation, you just rely on the integrity of the reviewers, which has shown to be lacking.
I'd like a Fediverse version of IMDb but that's another thing entirely.
Rotten tomatoes wasn’t paid. Their independent reviewers were. A federated version would be even more vulnerable to this kind of thing.
Maybe we should start posting our own movie review here on Lemmy and let lemmings comment and vote.
I use https://www.themoviedb.org/ quite often, it's pretty good.
For anyone that might care, I found this pretty neat IMDB front-end: https://libremdb.iket.me
Fosstard take
Oh, people still pay attention to review scores? 🤣
Of course they do, what a silly assumption.
As silly as applying review scores to art? Take a moment to really think about how dumb that is.
So what if they do? It’s anybody’s right to conduct a free transaction. If somebody wants to hire me to write a lovely review of their movie, why not? If I want to hire people to write some bad reviews about my competition, that’s a free transaction. Crazy communists want to exert big government control over the free review market.
Nice bait Mr Business Man
It's called integrity and readers having faith in the source material. When it's discovered you're full of shit there's zero benefit to anyone.
You're letting your lemmygrad bullshit seep into this community.
This person is the opposite of a lemmygrad loony
Integrity means if you take money from somebody you do your best to write an excellent review. Also, be equal and fair, charge the same price to write a good review for Oppenheimer as you do to write a good review for Barbie. Take pride in your work and write good compelling reviews, people will pay you what you are worth.
I’ve never even been to Leningrad, I only know it from the Billy Joel tune.
Remember IMDB in the early 00s? It was all you needed from what it set out to be. I recently went back to grab some lists for automation and holy shit it’s a wasteland of bullshit. I can’t imagine getting lost in it for hours learning about movies and deciding what I wanted to watch next if it was what it has become
I really loved IMDb back in the day. While the user ratings weren't perfect, there used to be a formula you could use to figure out the worthiness of a movie to watch. Now (10 years or so), IMDb user ratings are inundated with conservatives and older generations who tend to rate based on their fragile feelings rather than on how watchable a movie is.
I miss the IMDb message boards so much. It was so neat to be able to ask a question about a movie or read a post someone made three years before explaining the ending.
Letterboxd has been slowly filling that void for me
The term is enshittification, penned by Cory Doctorow
Shitifacation was my last international holiday where the airline lost my luggage
RT was shit from the start though.
not from the start, it wasn't no. after they sold out, it became a corrupted willing tool of the studios. i made the move to metacritic 10 years ago.