"I expected this, and it can't be helped." messaging implies to readers that those who would try to stop it are the ostracized out-group.
Among all the possible reactions to news of corruption (of any sort) I've come to the opinion that humorous-resignation normalizes corruption and is, therefore, just as corrupt.
In fact, if I were a bad guy, I'd hire people to leave comments of "The system is broken", "This is normal", "Everyone does it", "There's no way to stop it", and rebuff anyone that proposes solutions. "[Your solution] won't be enough because..."
I like this articulation. I might modify it slightly because you have, in turn, implied that posters are gaslighting the reader. When, in fact, they are merely exposing a defense mechanism. They say that every pessimist is a dissappointed optimist, and something similar has happened here. It is pitiful cowardice, and an unwitting collaboration with the corrupt, rather than an intentional one.
In the end, they need a scolding that will perhaps shame them into remembering they have a backbone. But I suggest that imprecision with the scold will reduce the efficacy of this bitter medicine, and the poster will focus on the minor inaccuracy of your analysis compare it with their own pure intent, dismissing the scold as bad faith. If instead you note that it is cowardice, and add a spoonful of pity to the scold, and remove the minor inaccuracy, it may have a greater effect.
I suspect you and @matheusmoreira are making the same point. It's not a thought I've articulated before... Perhaps, as I've said in the sibling-post, saying they're "complicit in the corruption" is better...
I generally agree with you but not on that point. I don't blame people for checking out. Fighting the wrongness of the world is just extremely tiresome. At some point, people change themselves instead. They stop trying to fruitlessly change things and move on with their lives, often with the goal to make a ton of money so they can isolate themselves from the rotten society.
Sometimes the only healthy way to react to something is to laugh at the absurdity of it as if you were a sociopathic Joker. It's a coping mechanism for dealing with an imperfect unfixable reality.
Putting effort* into normalizing disenfranchisement is propaganda for the bad guys.
That's my personal revelation.
But to your point, perhaps "just as corrupt" should have been "are, surprisingly, complicit in that corruption".
* "Effort" in this case being "going to the effort of posting". Be checked out? Sure. Being checked out is not my argument. Instead, being engaged-but-jaded and thus broadcasting "corruption is normal" (and thus penalizing corruption is "weird") is /itself/ corrupting.
Everyone knows there’s a lot of corruption out there. It’s overwhelmingly tempting to adopt an attitude of cynicism and essentially shut down when we hear about it. This is a dangerous and unproductive response, even though it’s a natural one [1].
Now you might respond that there’s so much corruption in the world and you, as an individual, can’t do much to stop it all. That’s probably true! However, the power and the great benefit of living in a free, democratic society (I’m assuming you live in a western or otherwise free country, otherwise you may have bigger concerns than review payola on Rotten Tomatoes) is that individuals are free to act and to hold people accountable when they abuse their power. Maybe this issue isn’t that important to you and that’s fine, but maybe some other issue actually is really important to you.
What I’m getting at with this long-winded post is simple: try directing your efforts toward one thing you care about and see if you can make a difference, even in one small way. It can go a long way to help you feel more effective and engaged in society!
How on EARTH you go from 'sardonic comment about a pointless movie review site' to "gosh, you really should try and make a difference to something in your life!" is as patronising a take as I'll ever hear.
also this:
"(I’m assuming you live in a western or otherwise free country, otherwise you may have bigger concerns than review payola on Rotten Tomatoes)"
... is simply hilarious, implying that 'western or otherwise free' countries don't have anything more important than messed up film reviews for me to want to change.
>The PR firm, named Bunker 15, is said to pay as much as $50.00 for a single Rotten Tomatoes review.
The article makes it sound like this is how much the firm is paying members of the official critics pool for reviews, not ordinary users. If $50 is the upper bound for how much they can get paid then journalism must be an even more terrible career than I already thought.
It's not the upper bound of how much they can get paid for journalism. It's the lower bound of what Bunker 15 will pay people who happen to be on Rotten Tomatoes as official reviewers for reviews.
Many more people have a talent and inclination for writing movie reviews than the number of movies coming out, and with the internet there is little barrier to entry anymore, so that outcome isn’t surprising.
Reviews have incentives, so crowd sourcing them is broken, in principle. You can try to monitor the reviewers, and put punishments and bans in place, or just pay them to do your job for you.
Seems like something a protocol could solve, not a company or a single person that can be easily bought. Crowd sourcing is not the problem, if no one can control the aggregated result.
A decentralised rating system would work really nicely on something like nostr. You still have the issue of spam to solve, but that's a larger, orthogonal issue.
Attaching a reputation to each critic and weighting their opinion on it could work.
Critics would be loathe to be discovered taking money if it dropped their ability to influence aggregate ranking (and those who send the money would be loathe to send it if sending it made it worthless).
It used to, the professional critics were mostly just those that were paid by newspapers or similar. Lately as in the last few years the gates were opened to basically anyone with a blog viewed by more than their parents. This let everything be manipulated much more easily.
Wrong. You can go to a lot of fundraisers by members of Congress for only $50. And they will absolutely listen and treat you like you are the most important person on earth.
You don't pay the $50 to change a vote; you pay it to be the first to plant the idea of which way they should vote on a new issue. The next guy is gonna have to pay a lot more to change it.
The most shocking part to me is that this is "news." It's like saying "Exclusive: there are fake reviews on Amazon!"
Companies depend on good reviews to make sales, so dishonest companies and reviewers see mutual benefit in purchasing dishonest reviews. It's a frustrating but old problem.
Sure, but it's also illegal to knowingly participate. The stuff on Amazon largely skates by because the products being reviewed and the businesses selling them aren't under US jurisdiction.
PR firms paying for reviews on RT on the other hand don't have that luxury...
People like Rotten Tomatoes. It's a trusted source of information. If you know of widespread review manipulation then that IS news because it affects how people perceive the site and it's trustworthiness. In this particular case, RT's response is commensurate with what you'd expect of an organization that takes their reputation seriously. There's nothing here that indicates this is the normal state of affairs
What a shocker... It's been a while since I cared about reviews on products or services... the only amusing iteration of the whole 'review' system was done by Vice while ago, they used to send this reporter to go to the worst reviewed X business in a certain area and review it himself... Very funny stuff indeed. 'One Star Reviews' it was called... even then, it wasn't like these places were being properly judged...
What I'd like some of the more reputable sites to do would be to expose/publish all the underhanded and over the top attempts by interested parties to influent their takes so like the folks at RedLetter Media, RogerEbert, etc. Redact names perhaps but publish the offers they get.
All review sites can be purchased, it doesn't matter what it is. Any platform where there is an up or down vote by Internet users is almost certainly, if not mostly, disingenuous. No review site should be trusted.
Find reviewers who agree with your tastes, and who like the things you enjoy. Follow them. Ignore the metacritic-like sites.
This is especially useful for games. Which is why it boggles my mind when people get upset at reviewers. Reviewers are not reviewing for everyone. Rather, they are reviewing for their readers. It's okay to disagree. It just means this persons tastes are different for yours.
The problem is people forgot how to use reviewers, and instead, just see them as weapons in a the game of "highest metacritic score."
It's silly.
Find the reviewers you agree with most of the time. Find several, listen to all of them, and make your judgement from that. Ignore the masses.
The problem normally lies in the fact that there is not much diversity of thought when ti comes to reviews... Most of them are in the same or select few cities, all have the same socio-economic backgrounds, all have the same political leanings, so all pretty much look at the world the same, and thus look at their entertainment the same
they are borg...
So today I have found it useful to look at bad reviews, and the worst reviews the critics have for something the more likely it is I will enjoy it...
It's a lot of work to find them. It would be neat if there were a site where I could rate a number of movies and then it offers to me a critic or critics I could follow who generally share my tastes.
I'd love this. Recommendation algorithms felt magical in the beginning, but I feel they're getting worse each year. They're getting manipulated by private interests or outright bought, and even when they're successful at remaining impartial they often get stuck in feedback loops. I don't want to keep listening to music that sounds just like what I've been listening to - I want to hear new and different things.
Human curation seems to be the only way out, but it can be so unergonomic. I don't really want to watch no-name movie reviewers on YouTube for hours until I find some I agree with. I don't want to read rambling blog posts to figure out whether or not someone liked a film.
The ideal flow for me would be: rate a handful of films, then it provides a list of curators that I can choose to follow. Each curator has a list of films that they've endorsed ("you should check this out, for this reason").
You're telling me that the huge disparity between Audience and Critics reviews on RT isn't because the unenlightened masses are to stupid to realize what a cinematic masterpiece <insert preferred culture war movie> was?
In my experience the scores are not usually that far apart (< 20 points or so let's say).
In the instances that it is far apart, the differences are usually easy to articulate. Critics appreciate and notice technical aspects of films more than average viewers, and are quicker to recognize cliches and tropes.
This can lead to movies having much higher audience scores than critic scores, which flies in the face of the notion that critics are getting paid.
Rotten Tomatoes, owned by Warner Bros. and NBC, part of Fandango Media, a movie ticketing company.
One would have to work hard to prove they were NOT biased in the first place, or at least since 2011 when they sold out to the movie industry.
FYI, the other big name in movie reviews, IMDb, has been owned by Amazon since 1998 (color me surprised, I didn't know it had been this long until I checked on Wikipedia), and they also had their own streaming service, IMDb TV, now called Amazon Freevee.
Maybe less in the review scene but Amazon through IMDB also bought BoxOfficeMojo which was such a nice and easy UI to see how movies were performing box office wise...
It is 2000s UX but sometimes that is quite functional. Especially the compare feature which seems like its generating the charts on demand but is quite nice to use.
When IMDB was sold, it was seen as if wikipedia was sold to a private company. Amazon promised to leave IMDB mostly alone, and to provide data feeds / db backups for free. They are still available although new features of IMDb have not been migrated to the original datasets.
Eh, the data feeds have narrowed, or at least they have since the last time I looked at them. It used to have exports of things like soundtracks. You wouldn't think that was valuable but I ended up using it.
Guess you don’t like Hamlet either then, which is a reinvented Amleth.
I struggle to see how the gp here can still be so bothered by the “feminist” film that did just a couple hundred thousand in the box office five years ago personally. That is a tiny drop in the bucket.
I think it’s fine to describe a film on a discussion forum. I just Googled what it is and copied the first thing I saw. I referenced it so others have that information too.
But do they have an employer / employee relationship with those critics or are they doing a section-230-compliant resharing / publicizing of those critics' personal opinions?
If you mean on, say, YouTube, that's something the FTC requires content creators to do, not YouTube. YouTube requires content creators to disclose to them for a separate reason: their advertising guarantees to advertisers include things like ad exclusion, so if your video includes a paid sponsorship from Pepsi, Coca-Cola can automatically not waste money injecting an ad into the middle of that video (they consider that impression run directly next to their competition while the competition is being actively painted in a good light to be a waste).
I only know about YouTube's policies, but I do wonder if the story at other social networks for paid-sponsorship disclosure is similar, since they all have an advertising component.
I don't think youtube supports ad-exclusion from content within the video. The creator doesn't have any space to declare a list of the names of companies or products they are endorsing. They merely have a checkbox to declare that the video contains paid product placement (required by UK law for example).
Sometimes I search for why the USA has outperformed global stocks and it is right there in front of me. Unfortunately it seems we are moving that direction too now.
Pretty sure the payments were to individuals, and not to any Rotten Tomatoes entity directly. So you would have to make some case about lack of due diligence instead, or sue a bunch of random people.
I read too much Money Stuff but aside from the disclosure issue this is probably securities fraud, and bribery as well - pushing the needle on positive reviews certainly ticks most of the boxes.
Jokes on them, if the critics think a movie is bad then i will watch it, movie that has a 100% fresh score from critics goes on my never watch list...
the User Reviews seem to be more accurate but RT does manipulate them as well citing "view botting" for any trends that do not match their desired outcome from a film
One way to void this is for RT to give you a custom score for each movie of how much you will like it.
They would generate that score by looking at other things you have rated, finding ~100 other users who have voted similarly to you, and then showing the scores that those other users thought of each movie you are thinking of watching.
This is much harder to bot, since you will only see the botted scores if you yourself vote like a bot.
Or they can just bring back the Rating system, and let users provide feedback to other users.... Instead of trying to hide that because they do not like the feedback some users give their "original content"
Netflix streaming only has a few thousand movies in the first place, the odds of them being able to give more than a few dozen good recommendations to anybody is pretty bad. And for people with particular tastes, the odds will be even worse. Their catalogue is simply too small.
Putting experience and expertise about a matter of taste on a pedestal is nonsense.
I don't share many values with movie critics. Here's an spicy example that will mark me as a philistine forever.
I think Princess Mononoke was an awful film with a navel gazing director who gets treated far too kindly because of a childish desire for "whimsy". Everytime I see a Ghibli pusher here, I laugh.
No movie critic will engage with such a perspective (because it is "wrong", the movie is "powerful", the art is "beautiful" and the characters are "strong" — every one of which is literally a matter of interpretation). Depending on critics is depending on people who have to satisfy their local equivalent of the Reddit front page. Why would you trust them except to know the current rightthink?
It's not the same as a scientist describing climate change or an engineer explaining the loads on a bridge.
Freddy Got Fingered, the movie I personally found funniest, is currently at 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's full of creative and quotable scenes, and never resorts to tired cliches (despite its genre there is no toilet humor). Penalizing a gross-out comedy for being "gross" is a clear failure of criticism. Even Roger Ebert, who usually judged movies by the standards of the genre, made this mistake.
Batman v Superman, the superhero movie I personally found most engaging, is at 29%. It's one of the few movies in the genre that feels like it has any ambition to be serious art. It takes the characters seriously, without the constant jokes the Marvel movies use to reassure the audience that they're not really comic book nerds. Critics considered this a reason to rate it poorly.
I saw a recent reappraisal of Freddy Got Fingered by Red Letter Media* that was very interesting; apparently it was also meant as a cash grab by studio execs, and Tom Green decided to make the weirdest movie he could possibly make.
While I don't personally like the "gross-out" style of movie, the the discussion of the movie exposed a lot of nuance behind the movie that I didn't know. The difference between the conversation and the original "professional reviews" really was telling; I much prefer the former to the later.
*: I am aware of the contradiction; in my defense, I mostly care about their comments about movie structure.
Princess Mononoke just has a slow gradual buildup. It builds the world and plays with plot tension and progression in interesting ways. Then saves the climax for the end of the film, with an after scene that gives a sense of finality.
It's easily one of my favourite films for these reasons.
"Expertise" in subjectively critiquing an art (movies) isn't a thing. You don't progress at it or have a better ability to critic as you do it. You might get better at portraying your feelings to people in the review, but they're still subjective feelings based on your personal tastes.
I’ve been wondering for a while if a Nate Silver like system of rating critics might be a better approach. Then you might get a more accurate accounting of critical reviews.
538 compares polling data against actual election results. What are you going to compare a critic's ratings against? If you compare them to the average critic or audience rating for a given movie, you will end up with a system that punishes any independent thought.
Box office draw? Or maybe the "legs" (how long a movie stays in the theater). You would need to adjust for movie type though, you wouldn't want to directly compare an independent documentary on an obscure subject vs. Disney's latest Marvel movie with a 500 million dollar marketing budget.
> I’ve been wondering for a while if a Nate Silver like system of rating critics might be a better approach
Critics aren't a proxy or predictor of some objectively verifiable outcome. If you want something useful for you, you could vuild a model with your ratings of movies you've seen, then then takes critics ratings of those movies to build a model of the relationship between individual critics ratings (in isolation or combination) and predicted ratings for you, but other than that you'd just be rating how well one proxy for “will I like it” matches a different proxy.
I've been using the website Movie Lens for over a decade and it works kind of like this, except you're not comparing to critics, it's just other users' average score
Yeah, I mean, its a pretty basic application of the general recommender-system concept, there's probably lots of places where there is an approximation of it for movies.
Criticker (https://www.criticker.com/) works like this too and gives really good recommendations but even keeping track of all the movies you've watched and rating them is more work than most people want to do.
The only reliable system is, unfortunately, a lot of work and generalizes very poorly. You need to pay close attention to individual critics so you understand their tastes and how your own tastes intersect with theirs.
This is why the pre-internet system of reading your local newspaper and seeing what their film reviewer thought worked okay. From long experience you'd know that the reviewer e.g. loved anything with anti-war themes, had really high standards for romance subplots, and couldn't stand fantasy. Thus you could fit their review into your own standards and perhaps wind up interpreting an intensely negative review as a recommendation that you'd love that film.
just thumbs up or down or quickly rate 50 movies then essentially assign critics point values based on closeness to your votes and rank them strongest to least and bam you've got a personal rating system that's way better than anything they've got now
>Critics aren't a proxy or predictor of some objectively verifiable outcome
Critical Drinker ones usually align quite well with both my opinion and the audience score.
The guardian came with the following real headline in 2019:
>Forget Joker: here's the film you should see about an extremist loner
While Todd Phillips’ vacuous DC origins tale fails to go beneath its grimy surface, low-budget drama Cuck offers a braver alternative
I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
Review sites can still be helpful. Even though many reviews might be paid for, you can usually spot them if you read carefully. And then you can focus on the genuine reviews.
I'm sorry but is anyone surprised? I haven't trust reviews in a long, long time. I'll take a look every now and then knowing they are largely fake and with an agenda. But to be shocked that some critics are being paid is pretty laughable in this day and age.
Fandango owns rotten tomatoes and warner brothers owns a minority stake in fandango.
Also anyone with a little cynicism who watches movies is probably not shocked by this.
There has been a lot of positive review inflation over time and there are other tricks like having a score for 'critics' and a separate score for 'top critics'.
Then there is question of if the review they post was actually positive or not. There are plenty of ways to bend and play games with their system and the seem to do it. Just like yelp 'does not delete bad reviews' if you pay them, they just get relegated to a hard to find page and not counted.
No shit. What's next? PR firms pay reddit power users to push ads and propaganda on the subs they control?
If PR firms can pay the nytimes to sell war, surely they are capable of buying a few positive reviews for movies.
Yelp is the last straw for me. If yelp reviews are found to be bought and sold, I'll lose all faith in social media and the reviews ecosystem. If we can't trust yelp, then who can we trust?
In the old days I trusted Siskel and Ebert for movie reviews the way I now trust guys like Project Farm and Jeff Geerling for product reviews.
We are born with pretty good 1:1 bullshit detectors, and exceptionally credible people easily earn my trust. Aggregated review platforms like rotten tomatoes and Amazon are just garbage.
Once Ebert died I largely stopped visiting that site. Do you feel that they still hold opinions largely similar to what Ebert would have if he was still alive?
I don't know; I discovered it after he died and have been using it mainly for post-Ebert reviews. I'm actually not super familiar with his taste in films.
It's never been the same for me. I didn't always agree with his opinion, but he always articulated it beautifully, and I could respect it. Critics these days seem like they're just churning out more content.
to me the trick is finding one or two reviewers that you understand (not necessarily agree with.) Then if the person says they dislike something and why, you can compare their history with your history of agreeing or disagreeing with them. When Ebert was alive, I had read (and saw) enough of his reviews to have that kind of reaction. For example, I knew Ebert hated David Lynch, and I understood (to an extent) why and I knew that I disagreed on the reasons, so I could filter his reviews. Other people writing on Eberts site don't give me that.
I tend to view the opposite. An individual is way easier to manipulate than an entire platform. Anybody who gets free products is immediately tainted. Project Farm says he pays for everything but all we have to trust that is his word. If you trust him, why don't you trust RT when they ban the company that paid for the reviews and say, "we take the integrity of our platform seriously"?
The more reviews that go into a rating, the more effort has to be made by bad actors to influence the score. And the higher the possibility that someone with integrity will reveal the scheme.
An aggregate of critics who may have different tastes or priorities than you is less useful for the reader than an individual person you're in tune with.
Even Project Farm is not perfect. His review for water pitchers is accurate but not giving the complete picture because he is measuring only one dimension of what makes a good water filtrations system but the video is acting like it alone determines how good the product is.
He measures TDS which I admit is one way to judge a water filter but people may have other considerations they have to consider such as are they looking to filter fluoride, bacteria, etc? Some of the poorly performing filters that fared badly in TDS filtering filter these other items much better/or handle the material better(not filtering fluoride).
Also small nitpick, he used one of the manufacturer's free provided TDS meters instead of buying a independent meter(the TDS meter was provided by the winning product). I know because I got the same meter provided free with my Zerowater meter. It seems accurate when I compare it to an independent meter but if you know that it was provided by the manufacturer it is not a good look.
Now this is the only video I have a gripe with because I have done a lot of independent research on water filters before seeing this video so these things popped out to me...but what about his other videos? I am not and cannot be an expert on all the different items he reviews so what else is he not testing properly or leaving out?
So I watch every PF video, and I have to defend him a little bit. Todd's videos are orders of _magnitude_ better than the garbage that Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, and other so-call "professional" review outfits provide. Not just in quality, but quantity even.
The first thing I will say is that water filters are not Todd's core competency. He usually tests motor oils and tools, so water filters are certainly out in left field for him.
He can't test every dimension of a product, partly due to lack of time and partly because he can't cheaply/easily test every scenario. TDS is mainly what people buy water filters for. Yes, SOME people want to filter flouride and bacteria but these are uncommon. (Flouride because it's generally safe to drink in municipal tap water, and bacteria because most water has flouride or comes from a sterile well.)
Even I would like to see him do more in-depth testing of some tools, but he does a good job overall of testing whether most products stand up to the maker's claims and whether they survive typical use. (It's surprising how many do not.) I'd personally like to see teardowns and subjective assessments of build quality along with more punishing longevity tests but I know that is asking quite a lot on top of what he already does.
Plus, the YouTube Recommendation AI demands weekly uploads and a constant stream of engagement from your viewers, or else your channel gets sent straight to the dark, sweaty backlot of obscurity and your funding along with it.
Orders of magnitude, plural? So you're saying that Todd is inevitably at least 100x better than Wirecutter?
No, he's not. Wirecutter is in fact extremely useful and reliable, in my experience. This one dude is not 100x better than that. Perhaps in some cases he's slightly better, sure. He is obviously not "orders of magnitude" better.
I am always fascinated by people insisting on base 10 orders of magnitude, which introduces an anthropocentric component to many quantifications where it arguably doesn't make a lot of sense.
If you take the natural choice of base, e, then "orders of magnitude" would only imply Todd to be 7.39 times better, which he is in many cases — for example, by measuring the self-information of reviews — and he may even cross that threshold in the aggregate.
My confidence in Project Farm was shook when he reviewed garden hoses. One of the hoses he reviewed never kinked, but I have the same hose and it kinks everyday multiples times in one session.
Most of these guys gave back in the day the new star wars movies good reviews, I don't trust them, I don't trust anyone who I go and see a movie and see it is complete and absolute garbanzo and yet this "acclaimed critic" is completely ignoring all its flaws, especially if said movie comes from a property related to Disney.
Ever since I discovered that some reviews used in rotten tomatoes are unscripted YouTube videos, in the sense that the reviewer just talks about a movie however their thoughts lead them without any organization, I stopped paying attention to rotten tomato scores. I am sure a lot of people prefer a video review to a carefully written and edited nytimes review (as an actual article), but that's not for me.
Not really surprising, this is just confirmation of what's been apparent for a while - Audience score is an accurate estimate of the movie, and the tomatometer (the critic score) basically just reflects the political correctness / marketing budget of the movie.
For me the critic score is a 'is this valuable as a cultural enrichment of movies' vs 'do people like it'.
What you do with information is than your decision.
Best case you know and trust your critics because you align to a certain degree with their experience and movie taste.
For example "now you see me" is a shit movie. Magic in a movie doesn't work and the main hidden character basically breaks the whole movie but apparently the audience loved it.
Rotten tomatoes scores aren't an average of a bunch of vectors, they're an aggregation of binary data points. Each individual review is distilled down to "good" (100%) or "rotten" (0%), then they're all averaged up.
A better way to view the critic score is, "X% of film critics think this film is worth watching."
And the audience score is: "Y% of moviegoers who leave movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes think this film is worth watching."
This is why Toy Story can get 99% (it's a crowd pleaser), and why daring, impactful films can sometimes get lower scores (they can be polarizing).
Worth watching for whom though? The critics have no idea what my tastes are. But I am pretty sure they are different from a film critic - I don't even know anyone who is a film critic or who knows anyone who is a film critic (and is not afraid to admit it). And from all evidence available, those critics by now are mostly into the business of shilling for studios, virtue signalling and sniffing their own farts. Why would I care what this bunch thinks is worth watching? If they want to watch it, let them, but it has nothing to do with me.
I don't think either is inherently accurate, honestly. Sometimes a low audience score is reliable, and sometimes it just means some niche crowd has gotten worked up about a particular movie and is review-bombing it.
More often, that's just a narrative invented / promulgated by people who won't/can't admit that their movie stinks. Instead of admitting they failed, they go looking for excuses. If you search social media you can find instances of wackjobs saying anything about anybody, so worthless anecdotal evidence for any review-bombing narrative is always easy to find. If your movie had lots of black people, say that it failed because audiences/reviewers are racist (and ignore the existence of movies with similar casts that were very well received). If your movie has lots of women, say that the audiences are sexist. If your movie mostly has white dudes in it, then fall back on some generic insult like...
> *“The studios didn’t invent Rotten Tomatoes, and most of them don’t like it,” says the filmmaker Paul Schrader. “But the system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don’t go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do.”
...calling the audiences dumb. There are plenty of smart movies that manage to find smart audiences, but for some reason those smart audiences just don't exist when considering his movie. He can't admit to himself that he doesn't make very good movies, so he prefers to think that everybody else is stupid. Blaming audiences is a coping mechanism for bad artists.
I don't think this reflects reality - many movies with enormous marketing budgets and which probably fit this "political correctness" definition routinely rate poorly on RT. I actually find the audience score is more likely to be "politicized" with review bombing by anonymous people who disagree with a film's message.
I always look at critic score like quality of the film (acting, editing, etc), and audience score as entertainment value. I look for films that have 80+ in one and 70+ in both.
I think your statement is quite a bit more correct if you just remove the "political correctness" option. Critic scores are based on marketing budgets - award shows in particular are funded by immense amounts of prestige lobbying.
I'm not sure I agree, but it would be worth studying empirically. The film Strange World, for instance, bombed, but has a 72% on RT and is certainly politically correct. It was quite poorly marketed.[0] While studios aren't in the habit of sharing marketing budgets, we can safely say the marketing expenditure was low.
This is a single datapoint, but my hypothesis is that political correctness does indeed account for a measurable (beyond noise) portion of a RT score. Marketing spend probably matters more, and genuinely excellent non-PC films (say, Oppenheimer) can succeed without PC, but PC does contribute.
What even makes one movie politically correct and another one not? The phrase has been watered down to the point where I think it now just means "vaguely liked by one political team and disliked by the other." So instead of using a meaningless euphemism, OP should articulate what exact themes, stories, or characters they think lead to a good critic score?
Simple "politically correct" films put the political narrative ahead of all things including historical accuracy, established canon, accuracy to other media (books, games, etc), scientific accuracy, or even good story telling.
They focus first on their political objectives, their political views, and what political issues they wish to advocate for above all else
This has been an increasing trope in modern film and shows.
"The narrative" is now even a meme... The other coded phrase for a "politically correct" film is "re-imagined for a modern audience"
Political narrative? Can we get even more vague? That's what I was getting at: People complain about movies and their "political narratives" and "political objectives" but nobody wants to mention specific narratives or objectives, and why they object to them. I don't recall anything overtly political in most modern movies. There was no campaign speech to elect Biden in the latest Captain America. So what exact "narratives" is everyone complaining about? Be specific.
EDIT: Ugh, looks like replier reached for personal attacks, so this thread has sadly derailed into flamewar :( Hitting the eject button.
Either you are living under a rock, are being purposely obtuse, or support the politics being pushed so you either do not see it or just willfully ignore it.
>There was no campaign speech to elect Biden in the latest Captain America
This is just a stupid statement
>I don't recall anything overtly political in most modern movies.
Snow White, Indian Jones 5, Just about Every Marvel Movie Past infinity War, 2 of the 3 Star Wars Films in the new Trilogy, The Little Mermaid... Shall I go on?
It is more pronounced in TV Shows however, She Hulk, Season 2 and 3 of Witcher, Rings of Power, etc etc etc
>So what exact "narratives" is everyone complaining about?
> Snow White, Indian Jones 5, Just about Every Marvel Movie Past infinity War, 2 of the 3 Star Wars Films in the new Trilogy, The Little Mermaid... Shall I go on?
That's a list of movies, not an identification of political content in movies.
Isn’t this just dependent on the political views the person brings to the movie?
Recent history has shown us that any narrative can be termed “political” if it helps one side drive a narrative.
Just look at the faux outrage over induction ovens and banning beers. Completely fabricated nonsense used to drive a narrative. This is the true trope.
Got it. So the specific issue is that women and underrepresented minority groups are being included in casts and crews, and that an award show is adding such inclusion to their criteria... and that's "politically correct". Huh, okay.. Anyway... I'm glad at least someone's being specific--thanks!
Let's use a less contentious topic: FOSS vs proprietary software. There is a common sentiment I've seen on HN that FOSS is superior to proprietary software, and all else being equal, I agree with that sentiment. However, in reality, not all else is equal. Some proprietary software is just better at solving certain problems than FOSS equivalents – maybe the proprietary software is more reliable or has a better UX or is more regularly maintained or has more features a user wants or differs along a host of other dimensions. Thus, if someone makes a categorical claim that all FOSS software is superior to similar proprietary software, we would regard that comment as propaganda. This doesn't mean that FOSS software is bad or that good FOSS software can't be created or that no one should try to create excellent FOSS software.
This is an analogy or what I mean by "political correctness" (or related concepts like "wokeness" and "social justice warrior"). Great art communicates truth about the human condition in a beautiful way. This is, of course, open to interpretation, yet somehow many people agree that, for example, The Godfather is a great film. Why? I believe the film shows us some truth about the human condition (particularly our ability to descend into evil) through a gripping story with excellent characters, visuals, dialogue, plotting, etc.
When we substitute an arbitrary checklist of criteria a film must meet that have nothing to do with communicating truth about the human condition in a beautiful way, we are engaging in "political correctness," and we have ceased to value art but instead propaganda. For instance, if we were to use the new Academy standards for Oscar-nominated movies, the Godfather would fail – the cast is almost all white, has no LGBT and IIRC includes the n-word. Amadeus, another excellent film (one of the most praised in Oscar history) would certainly fail, since the cast is all white and almost entirely male, as we would expect from a film set in 18th century Vienna. This does not mean great art cannot have diverse casts, LGBT characters or a lack of "problematic" content. For a recent example, the excellent show Andor ticks almost all of the DEI checkboxes – LGBT character(s), diverse cast –, but it also has smart writing, interesting characters, sensible plots, beautiful visuals and a compelling story. As long as the former are subordinated to the latter, a work remains art and not "politically correct" propaganda. At the same time, Oppenheimer ticks almost none of the DEI checkboxes and yet is arguably one of the best films of this century.
> So instead of using a meaningless euphemism, OP should articulate what exact themes, stories, or characters they think lead to a good critic score?
I think this comment betrays exactly what I'm critiquing. Great art can't be shoved in a box like this. Mediocre art has identifiable flaws - maybe it's visually bland or maybe the dialogue is poor or the characters act in inexplicable ways. These all detract from the beauty and truth of the work.
You took the time to write out a thoughtful reply so I'll respond, even though this article and thread is long in the past.
I'm not sure what FOSS has to do with any of this, so I'll leave that be. For The Godfather, obviously what counts as Great Art is subjective. I think the idea of greatness can change as the public's norms/values change over time. A lot of people look back at classic movies from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and say "Yea that was a great movie for its time, but measured using today's moral yardstick--yow! Some of that stuff is actually not so good."
If The Godfather was made today, who could say whether the cast and crew would be more diverse? It probably would be, at least the crew. Would that make it any better or worse a film? There's no way to know. Maybe the creative leadership positions, financiers, and distribution companies would be more diverse. Would that make it a better or worse movie? Would The Godfather somehow not have been able to show truth about the human condition if its executive producer was black?
Times have changed. "Ticking DEI checkboxes" as you put it, should not be difficult--or even something a studio has to consciously think about. If you're a business or studio and are up all night sweating bullets about "Oh lord how am I going to tick DEI checkboxes," you're doing something fundamentally very, very, very wrong in your business. Your point about Andor supports this: A studio can easily do this (respect the norms of today) and still make a great movie!
Critics are definitely sensitive to, for lack of a bettet word, elitist themes. I don't mean to say that they reflect the elite, but rather an elite.
Which is kind of inevitable because how else would you choose who becomes a critic other than choosing someone whose idea of quality is at least somewhat close to those of the artists, producers and other critics.
s/political correctness/art world correctness/ is probably a better phrasing.
The art world is a _thing_, with tastes that can vary quite a bit from mid-brow average consumers. Its sensitive in its own way to "PC" and lobbying, but is distinct to a degree (albeit entangled, naturally).
Probably because they have an axe to grind and can’t stop themselves from souring every discussion by turning it toward politics. I see this happening more and more on HN and I hate it because this is one of the places I like to go when I need a break from the constant culture war bullshit.
Most of your recent comments are all 'culture war politics' related. That you'd accuse anyone else of grinding a political axe belies and lack of self awareness.
No they arent. When culture war things hit the top I may respond but most of mine are definitely not. Also it’s a gross habit to go looking at peoples comment history looking to win an argument in a thread, address the comment or buzz off.
It doesn’t matter what my political views are. The fact of the matter is that there are spaces online for this type of discourse and HN isn’t one of them. There are good reasons for that. This is made abundantly clear here:
I mean, rotten tomatoes ratings have been fairly political for a while.
It is critic-career suicide to give negative ratings to any girl-power movie, no matter how bad or artistically bankrupt. At the same time, any movie that gets republicans excited (even if it isn't political) will struggle to be certified-fresh on the platform.
> anti-woke”/anti-pc comments
If that's the sentiment, then that's the sentiment. I know it sounds like we've had an influx of new angry redditors. But, a lot of old school HN folks have fundamental disagreements with the woke/pc tent.
I agree that HN should try to avoid culture wars. But not when it is the crux of the very thread we're on.
> is critic-career suicide to give negative ratings to any girl-power movie, no matter how bad or artistically bankrupt
Oh come on, this is exactly what I’m talking about. No critic worth their salt is afraid to criticize a movie if it’s bad or mediocre.
I remember just recently the “woke” Marvel Eternals getting plenty of sniffy reviews because it was a boring endevour. Ditto for the Ghost Busters remake, Disney live actions etc.
The only thing is that the critics write actual reviews, they don’t just say “I hate the new Little Mermaid because they made Ariel black” like all the anti-woke mouthbreathers on the internet.
I find this comment somewhat humorous because it pretty well sums up the frustration with "politically correct" movies to begin with; that the writer/director has an axe to grind and can’t stop themselves from souring their movie/TV show by turning it toward politics, especially when people are looking towards media specifically for escape from the culture war.
Or to put it more clearly: the way you feel about ycombinator comments here is very similar to how some people feel about e.g. LOTR or any other piece of media they otherwise treasure. I should think you might empathize with their position more if your politics weren't so opposed.
I like the take of Nassim Taleb on a tangent idea - restaurants in New York that get awards from other restaurant owners have no better change of surviving than the ones not winning awards from peers or critics. You need an external validation, such as real customers.
Also, people that rate movies online may not be representative of the entire movie-watcher population, so that may be, in some cases, also not a very accurate measurement, unless you yourself are a typical movie rater.
In the gaming world, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare got the most disliked trailer ever on YouTube, and still sold more than 13m copies. Somewhat similarly, logic-devoid, low-quality children movies can get as many dislikes as parents want, children will still watch them.
I'm sure Taleb has more to say, but I would say that whether a restaurant survives has a loose correlation to the quality of the food. Especially in NYC. There are plenty of thriving restaurants that will serve you garbage food with bad service (Anything in Times Square).
The point is that commercial success in a variety of industries is a result of a variety of factors, product quality is frequently not the most relevant.
That is: a restaurant owner can correctly say that another restaurant has excellent food and service without that being an endorsement of the restaurant's ability to survive as a business.
You're perfectly right, I'm conflating quality with business success.
I would disagree with the loose correlation point. Although it's just one component of a restaurant's broader strategy for success, quality is undoubtedly crucial. While in Times Square, I would doubt you would blindly choose any restaurant without considering food and service quality.
Also, I would say that while a restaurant owner can correctly evaluate another, it's not necessary implied that specifically an award winner has proven that the unbiased opinions of others put them in this position.
the sites owned entirely by Warner and NBCUniversal so...im sure the hot dog factory gives glowing reviews of their new hotdogs..
Vulture ran an article on September 2023 that raised criticisms including the fact that since the acquisition by Fandango in 2016, the rules have changed in ways that happen to favor the biggest movies. The article cited publicity company Bunker 15 as an example of how scores can be boosted by recruiting obscure, often self-published reviewers to write positively, or selectively hiding negative reviews, using the example of 2018's Ophelia.
Don't think it's to do with ownership. Google reviews have the same problem. There are tons of 1 star reviews that praise movies with what sounds like critic or AI written text.
Try searching for barbie movie for an example. Click more reviews and filter by 1 star. The third says:
"Barbie," director and co-writer Greta Gerwig’s summer splash, is a dazzling achievement, both technically and in tone. It’s a visual feast that succeeds as both a gleeful escape and a battle cry. So crammed with impeccable attention to detail is "Barbie” that you couldn’t possibly catch it all in a single sitting; you’d have to devote an entire viewing just to the accessories, for example.
It even says ADVERTISEMENT in capital letters but below the fold where you have to expand the whole review to see it. Despite that this review directly contradicts its star rating, 774 "people" have marked it as helpful.
Scroll down a bit further and there is another, "If this was an item on the McDonald’s menu, it would be everyone’s favourite - the Oreo McFlurry. Hands down, I don’t think I could name a better film. The acting was superb!" which supposedly nearly a thousand people found helpful. This one doesn't say anywhere that it's an ad.
When I first noticed this, almost all the top 1 star reviews were ads. Real users have been correcting it and the top two reviews are now real. The second review says "Update: if you notice google is showing mostly 5 star reviews when there is almost an equal number of 1 stars to 5 stars hence why the average is 3 stars." and the 5th post says "I noticed a few giving spectaculars about the movie but rating it as one star, maybe to drown out the real reviews?" so irate users have been noticing the manipulation too.
It's really very embarrassing for Google. It's gone now but originally when you searched for this movie there was a special pink sparkle effect. So they're paying engineers to write special code just for this movie whilst ignoring obvious fake reviews, claiming they were meta-reviewed by thousands of people and they still haven't cleaned this up even weeks later.
I followed your search instructions - and skimmed a few hundred of the 1 star reviews, the only 2 I could find that were positive are the ones you mentioned. So I'm not sure this is as much an issue as you indicate?
That review saying "ADVERTISEMENT" is not because they are stating the review is an advert, it's because where they copy/pasted it from includes the alt text of an advert.
Not sure. I noticed this problem weeks ago. Back then those two were the top results if you filtered for 1 star reviews, so it was really noticeable. I didn't do an in depth investigation though.
IMO audience score is more of a proxy for movie quality minus movie expectations. A lot of niche genre films do okay because 1: the only people who watch them are enthusiasts and 2: nobody goes in with high expectations to begin with. If everyone watched them and reviewed them they'd do much worse.
For a mainstream example, take Fast X. It's an objectively stupid movie with a great audience score - because it's exactly what it says on the tin! Nobody is confused about what they're watching. Nobody thinks they're going to get terrific drama or romance or suspense. They're going to get the 9th sequel to a comedy action movie about dudes driving cars.
Yeah, the audience score is in no way an accurate measure of quality because it is provided by a self-selected group of people who both paid for the movie and went online to rate it. The end result is that a lot of movies viewed as failures will have high audience ratings as long as they can reach some small passionate audience. Just looking at some current movies:
Blue Beetle: 78% critics, 92% audience
Gran Turismo: 63%, 98%
Elemental: 74%, 93%
Meg 2: 29% 73%
Haunted Mansion 38%, 84%
Indiana Jones: 69%, 88%
Little Mermaid 67%, 94%
Those audience scores are not "more accurate" in any way. People who are forced to see these movies like them less than people who chose to see it.
There also really isn't anything currently that fits into "the political correctness / marketing budget of the movie" claim of OP. It seems like they are just buying into cultural war nonsense. The closest I can find is Barbie and its critic score is 5% higher than the audience score, so not much of a gap.
The one useful aspect is that if you only care about the scores of movies you were already interested in, the audience score actually is quite accurate. If you already know "I am the sort of person who might pay to watch the little mermaid" then you can have good confidence you'll like it based on the audience score.
This does not always work. For example: Knock Down The House started off with an excellent audience score and stayed that way for about a year...until Tucker Carlson mentioned it on his show and then it plummeted to its current score. So how can you infer whether the quality is good?
I suspect the negative reviewers got what they wanted: they feel better because they 'helped' in damaging someone they hate in some small way and anyone who just glances at it would pass on the film.
One feature that would be nice would be a filter to filter out reviewers based on certain criteria
-only one review
-only has reviews on certain films
-account life is less than specific threshold
That DB query is probably too expensive to run on a free site though. An app that scrapes the RT reviews and filters out based on this criteria has been on my list of things to build.
I feel like these are added dimensions beyond existing rating systems but I haven't found a good way to capture the data or communicate it.
At a high level what I really want is two ratings: Global rating and does this deliver what it promised. A greasy spoon is objectively not a good restaurant but it scratches an itch and you have certain relatively low expectations of it so in the context of greasy spoons generally I might rate the restaurant 5 stars even if globally I'd give it two stars.
As you say with Fast X: objectively it is not a good movie but it absolutely delivers what it promised. People who like that movie series will be pleased with it so in that context it deserves a positive rating.
As a follow-on I want to tell the system about the things I like + the things I hate. Then I want the system to give more weight to ratings from others who both like and hate the same things. I honestly don't care if critics or audiences liked the movie... I want to know if people who in some way think like me enjoyed it.
Audience score is functionally useless though, as there are entire industries devoted to manipulating it, and the sites know this and do nothing to stop it.
I kinda understand the big movie titles. You want to get the early access and pre-screenings... So you cannot be too critical. But streaming shows? Or maybe they ban Amazon accounts...
And this is why I'm still salty about Youtube switching from star ratings to binary like/dislike (and everyone else then following the leader), over 10 years ago
It seems to me like fans of LotR decided before it even came out that they didn't like it and have brigaded platforms with negative reviews. Maybe its not even a conscious effort. Lots of people dislike Amazon. And lots of the fans disliked the whole notion of turning this content into a show. I think that has colored the reaction to the show among the public while critics can usually take a more objective view
I've seen a couple of critiques on it, and they all seem to be well-founded. How do you differentiate between "decided before it even came out that they didn't like it" and "have real grievances that support their view of the show"?
That sounds like the sort of cope the show creators would come up with to shield their egos. It's not the creators fault, it's the audiences' fault for hating new things or something... I disregard these narratives. Blaming the audience is pure cope.
I knew some LOTR superfans who were upset with the first three Peter Jackson movies only being about a thousand hours long and omitting various plots and characters.. but these people were a minority and most loved the new thing. And then when Jackson made the hobbit movies the reception was very different. The audience didn't change, his new movies just weren't up to the same standard they expected. And if the show is getting hate, I think it's fair to assume that's because the show isn't good either. Maybe it would get better reviews if it were original IP and didn't have Jackson's first three LOTR movies casting a shadow on it, but blaming the fans for this isn't right.
Rings of Power is ok. More flash than substance. And the dialog and writing is genuinely bad in places. In one episode you had two characters pull the "don't kill him, we may need him" trope on each other within a minute of each other over the same character. And nothing had really changed otherwise. They both wanted to kill the guy and both stopped the other from killing him because, I don't know, show.
It's a solid C+. Like Wheel of Time or Foundation. Not horrible. Not great either. Not the best take on the source material, but it's fine I guess.
I don't know, I feel like both the people who say it is great and the people who say it is horrible are both wrong. If you would ask me for an opinion, I would say it is a show that I watched.
Existing IP comes with existing baggage seems fair to me. If they did something original people wouldn't have those expectations, but in return also not the existing fame.
I have no strong attachment to LotR. The Rings of Power was just bad: the characters were shallow stereotypes, the acting was poor, the plot wasn't interesting.
I was surprised when watching the first episode, after seeing 83% from critics on RT. It did not match my expectations from prior RT scores. I remember one movie that had a 90-something rating from critics and 30-something rating from viewers, whose name I unfortunately can't remember. It was strange, like a C movie from an alternate universe with different tropes. I can imagine being a reviewer, bored to death of the endless rehashes I have to watch, enjoying it because at least it's different. Rings of Power, not so much.
On the very off chance that anyone knows the name of this strange movie, here are my recollections of it: they come out when you sleep, beats of 4, talking to strangers, robotic face visors, going with the flow vs. machines.
They did a really good job of shitting on their fan base before it came out. Every criticism with met with you're a bigot, or a racist, or a misogynist.
They decided to slap the name on a show that only represented LOTR in name. So, I think they fairly get to receive the backlash of an obvious money grab.
I looked for their critic reviews and they only list one. That one saw two episodes and said it's off to "a promising start", mostly talking about the production values which I don't think anyone will argue against. I think I might have given it a positive rating after a couple episodes too. The plot soon veers into too many nonsensical moments to ignore though, like an elf swimming across an ocean.
It means 83% of reviewers gave it a 'passing grade' which is defined as a 6/10+.
The formulation is a way to collapse precise scores into a binary classification of thumbsup or thumbsdown. So, another way to put it would be 83% of reviewers 'liked it'
Side note, I used to really like Rotten Tomatoes 10+ years ago but I noticed a drop in quality, likely Goodhart's law in action as some other commenters here have pointed out.
RT ratings are weird because they don't reflect how much critics liked a movie, only whether they rated it "positive" or "negative". The movie with the highest rating ever is Paddington 2 - not because any reviewers thought it was the best movie ever, but because nobody hated it. It ranks higher than Citizen Kane, despite many reviewers literally calling that the best movie ever - but at least one reviewer didn't like it. So RT ratings favors inoffensive and uncontroversial movies appealing to the largest possible demographics.
And shows are often reviewed after only a few episodes. Typically two to four episodes are released to reviewers before the premiere, and this is what the review is based on.
So a high rating means most reviewers reacted positively to the first few episodes.
I don't think people are buying television show ratings. Usually, when a TV show is way off the rating you'd expect, it's because it got really bad at the end of the season and critics only screen the first few episodes. For whatever reason, Rings of Power also had serious podcast energy behind it, like nerds with their own shows really wanted it to be good just to be worth talking about. This is related to the complaint from the article about RT starting to count small self-published critics. A lot of them are not really "critics" in the normal sense. They're extremely enthusiastic superfans that cover some subset of a particular genre and like virtually everything that gets made in that genre.
I have seen Rotten Tomatoes apparently just glitch out scores, too. Wheel of Time season one has 94 reviews with 64 positive, which is 68% positive, yet the tomatometer says 81%. Sometimes that is because of the episode-by-episode reviews, which are overwhelmingly from recap blogs that only cover what they like, but even in this case, that doesn't make up the difference.
They only let reviewers see the first two episodes. I'm not saying the first two episodes were great, just not enough. Some other shows let reviewers see half a season or more, one of the trade offs is that you as new viewer have to be very careful or only go to sites that respect the viewer and do not spoil stuff unnecessarily.
The FTC is actually in the process of finalizing new regulations that would target abuses like these. Unfortunately, they only apply to the united states so will likely have little effect. This post goes into why the FTC's proposed regulations are likely to fail. https://www.perfectrec.com/posts/why-the-ftcs-new-fake-revie...
Isn't that how the entire world rolling? There was even a website to buy upvotes on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27580387 (looks like dead now). Luckily, because of the nature of the HN community, buying upvotes here is the silliest marketing strategy. The community smells bullshit from thousand miles.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 305 ms ] threadAmong all the possible reactions to news of corruption (of any sort) I've come to the opinion that humorous-resignation normalizes corruption and is, therefore, just as corrupt.
In fact, if I were a bad guy, I'd hire people to leave comments of "The system is broken", "This is normal", "Everyone does it", "There's no way to stop it", and rebuff anyone that proposes solutions. "[Your solution] won't be enough because..."
In the end, they need a scolding that will perhaps shame them into remembering they have a backbone. But I suggest that imprecision with the scold will reduce the efficacy of this bitter medicine, and the poster will focus on the minor inaccuracy of your analysis compare it with their own pure intent, dismissing the scold as bad faith. If instead you note that it is cowardice, and add a spoonful of pity to the scold, and remove the minor inaccuracy, it may have a greater effect.
I generally agree with you but not on that point. I don't blame people for checking out. Fighting the wrongness of the world is just extremely tiresome. At some point, people change themselves instead. They stop trying to fruitlessly change things and move on with their lives, often with the goal to make a ton of money so they can isolate themselves from the rotten society.
Sometimes the only healthy way to react to something is to laugh at the absurdity of it as if you were a sociopathic Joker. It's a coping mechanism for dealing with an imperfect unfixable reality.
That's my personal revelation.
But to your point, perhaps "just as corrupt" should have been "are, surprisingly, complicit in that corruption".
* "Effort" in this case being "going to the effort of posting". Be checked out? Sure. Being checked out is not my argument. Instead, being engaged-but-jaded and thus broadcasting "corruption is normal" (and thus penalizing corruption is "weird") is /itself/ corrupting.
Now you might respond that there’s so much corruption in the world and you, as an individual, can’t do much to stop it all. That’s probably true! However, the power and the great benefit of living in a free, democratic society (I’m assuming you live in a western or otherwise free country, otherwise you may have bigger concerns than review payola on Rotten Tomatoes) is that individuals are free to act and to hold people accountable when they abuse their power. Maybe this issue isn’t that important to you and that’s fine, but maybe some other issue actually is really important to you.
What I’m getting at with this long-winded post is simple: try directing your efforts toward one thing you care about and see if you can make a difference, even in one small way. It can go a long way to help you feel more effective and engaged in society!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
also this: "(I’m assuming you live in a western or otherwise free country, otherwise you may have bigger concerns than review payola on Rotten Tomatoes)" ... is simply hilarious, implying that 'western or otherwise free' countries don't have anything more important than messed up film reviews for me to want to change.
The article makes it sound like this is how much the firm is paying members of the official critics pool for reviews, not ordinary users. If $50 is the upper bound for how much they can get paid then journalism must be an even more terrible career than I already thought.
I don't know how niche outlets are even making it, even with large fractions of pure SEO "pay the bills" articles.
A decentralised rating system would work really nicely on something like nostr. You still have the issue of spam to solve, but that's a larger, orthogonal issue.
Critics would be loathe to be discovered taking money if it dropped their ability to influence aggregate ranking (and those who send the money would be loathe to send it if sending it made it worthless).
Companies depend on good reviews to make sales, so dishonest companies and reviewers see mutual benefit in purchasing dishonest reviews. It's a frustrating but old problem.
PR firms paying for reviews on RT on the other hand don't have that luxury...
On a side note, a lot of people missed the chance to watch a show called Review, which is too damn good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_(TV_series) go watch it.
Find reviewers who agree with your tastes, and who like the things you enjoy. Follow them. Ignore the metacritic-like sites.
This is especially useful for games. Which is why it boggles my mind when people get upset at reviewers. Reviewers are not reviewing for everyone. Rather, they are reviewing for their readers. It's okay to disagree. It just means this persons tastes are different for yours.
The problem is people forgot how to use reviewers, and instead, just see them as weapons in a the game of "highest metacritic score."
It's silly.
Find the reviewers you agree with most of the time. Find several, listen to all of them, and make your judgement from that. Ignore the masses.
they are borg...
So today I have found it useful to look at bad reviews, and the worst reviews the critics have for something the more likely it is I will enjoy it...
Human curation seems to be the only way out, but it can be so unergonomic. I don't really want to watch no-name movie reviewers on YouTube for hours until I find some I agree with. I don't want to read rambling blog posts to figure out whether or not someone liked a film.
The ideal flow for me would be: rate a handful of films, then it provides a list of curators that I can choose to follow. Each curator has a list of films that they've endorsed ("you should check this out, for this reason").
Well color me shocked, absolutely shocked.
In the instances that it is far apart, the differences are usually easy to articulate. Critics appreciate and notice technical aspects of films more than average viewers, and are quicker to recognize cliches and tropes.
This can lead to movies having much higher audience scores than critic scores, which flies in the face of the notion that critics are getting paid.
One would have to work hard to prove they were NOT biased in the first place, or at least since 2011 when they sold out to the movie industry.
FYI, the other big name in movie reviews, IMDb, has been owned by Amazon since 1998 (color me surprised, I didn't know it had been this long until I checked on Wikipedia), and they also had their own streaming service, IMDb TV, now called Amazon Freevee.
It is 2000s UX but sometimes that is quite functional. Especially the compare feature which seems like its generating the charts on demand but is quite nice to use.
When IMDB was sold, it was seen as if wikipedia was sold to a private company. Amazon promised to leave IMDB mostly alone, and to provide data feeds / db backups for free. They are still available although new features of IMDb have not been migrated to the original datasets.
It's a pity keywords aren't in those datasets. Still, it's nice that this still exists. https://developer.imdb.com/non-commercial-datasets/
I struggle to see how the gp here can still be so bothered by the “feminist” film that did just a couple hundred thousand in the box office five years ago personally. That is a tiny drop in the bucket.
I just can’t fathom why you felt compelled to reference it and the fact that it was “feminist”
I only know about YouTube's policies, but I do wonder if the story at other social networks for paid-sponsorship disclosure is similar, since they all have an advertising component.
the User Reviews seem to be more accurate but RT does manipulate them as well citing "view botting" for any trends that do not match their desired outcome from a film
They would generate that score by looking at other things you have rated, finding ~100 other users who have voted similarly to you, and then showing the scores that those other users thought of each movie you are thinking of watching.
This is much harder to bot, since you will only see the botted scores if you yourself vote like a bot.
I don't share many values with movie critics. Here's an spicy example that will mark me as a philistine forever.
I think Princess Mononoke was an awful film with a navel gazing director who gets treated far too kindly because of a childish desire for "whimsy". Everytime I see a Ghibli pusher here, I laugh.
No movie critic will engage with such a perspective (because it is "wrong", the movie is "powerful", the art is "beautiful" and the characters are "strong" — every one of which is literally a matter of interpretation). Depending on critics is depending on people who have to satisfy their local equivalent of the Reddit front page. Why would you trust them except to know the current rightthink?
It's not the same as a scientist describing climate change or an engineer explaining the loads on a bridge.
Freddy Got Fingered, the movie I personally found funniest, is currently at 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's full of creative and quotable scenes, and never resorts to tired cliches (despite its genre there is no toilet humor). Penalizing a gross-out comedy for being "gross" is a clear failure of criticism. Even Roger Ebert, who usually judged movies by the standards of the genre, made this mistake.
Batman v Superman, the superhero movie I personally found most engaging, is at 29%. It's one of the few movies in the genre that feels like it has any ambition to be serious art. It takes the characters seriously, without the constant jokes the Marvel movies use to reassure the audience that they're not really comic book nerds. Critics considered this a reason to rate it poorly.
While I don't personally like the "gross-out" style of movie, the the discussion of the movie exposed a lot of nuance behind the movie that I didn't know. The difference between the conversation and the original "professional reviews" really was telling; I much prefer the former to the later.
*: I am aware of the contradiction; in my defense, I mostly care about their comments about movie structure.
It's easily one of my favourite films for these reasons.
Critics aren't a proxy or predictor of some objectively verifiable outcome. If you want something useful for you, you could vuild a model with your ratings of movies you've seen, then then takes critics ratings of those movies to build a model of the relationship between individual critics ratings (in isolation or combination) and predicted ratings for you, but other than that you'd just be rating how well one proxy for “will I like it” matches a different proxy.
This is why the pre-internet system of reading your local newspaper and seeing what their film reviewer thought worked okay. From long experience you'd know that the reviewer e.g. loved anything with anti-war themes, had really high standards for romance subplots, and couldn't stand fantasy. Thus you could fit their review into your own standards and perhaps wind up interpreting an intensely negative review as a recommendation that you'd love that film.
Critical Drinker ones usually align quite well with both my opinion and the audience score.
The guardian came with the following real headline in 2019:
>Forget Joker: here's the film you should see about an extremist loner While Todd Phillips’ vacuous DC origins tale fails to go beneath its grimy surface, low-budget drama Cuck offers a braver alternative
Review sites can still be helpful. Even though many reviews might be paid for, you can usually spot them if you read carefully. And then you can focus on the genuine reviews.
Also anyone with a little cynicism who watches movies is probably not shocked by this.
There has been a lot of positive review inflation over time and there are other tricks like having a score for 'critics' and a separate score for 'top critics'.
Then there is question of if the review they post was actually positive or not. There are plenty of ways to bend and play games with their system and the seem to do it. Just like yelp 'does not delete bad reviews' if you pay them, they just get relegated to a hard to find page and not counted.
If PR firms can pay the nytimes to sell war, surely they are capable of buying a few positive reviews for movies.
Yelp is the last straw for me. If yelp reviews are found to be bought and sold, I'll lose all faith in social media and the reviews ecosystem. If we can't trust yelp, then who can we trust?
Worse is that Web Search Engines promote it as authoritative gospel.
We are born with pretty good 1:1 bullshit detectors, and exceptionally credible people easily earn my trust. Aggregated review platforms like rotten tomatoes and Amazon are just garbage.
That's something you don't get with aggregators.
The more reviews that go into a rating, the more effort has to be made by bad actors to influence the score. And the higher the possibility that someone with integrity will reveal the scheme.
He measures TDS which I admit is one way to judge a water filter but people may have other considerations they have to consider such as are they looking to filter fluoride, bacteria, etc? Some of the poorly performing filters that fared badly in TDS filtering filter these other items much better/or handle the material better(not filtering fluoride).
Also small nitpick, he used one of the manufacturer's free provided TDS meters instead of buying a independent meter(the TDS meter was provided by the winning product). I know because I got the same meter provided free with my Zerowater meter. It seems accurate when I compare it to an independent meter but if you know that it was provided by the manufacturer it is not a good look.
Now this is the only video I have a gripe with because I have done a lot of independent research on water filters before seeing this video so these things popped out to me...but what about his other videos? I am not and cannot be an expert on all the different items he reviews so what else is he not testing properly or leaving out?
The first thing I will say is that water filters are not Todd's core competency. He usually tests motor oils and tools, so water filters are certainly out in left field for him.
He can't test every dimension of a product, partly due to lack of time and partly because he can't cheaply/easily test every scenario. TDS is mainly what people buy water filters for. Yes, SOME people want to filter flouride and bacteria but these are uncommon. (Flouride because it's generally safe to drink in municipal tap water, and bacteria because most water has flouride or comes from a sterile well.)
Even I would like to see him do more in-depth testing of some tools, but he does a good job overall of testing whether most products stand up to the maker's claims and whether they survive typical use. (It's surprising how many do not.) I'd personally like to see teardowns and subjective assessments of build quality along with more punishing longevity tests but I know that is asking quite a lot on top of what he already does.
Plus, the YouTube Recommendation AI demands weekly uploads and a constant stream of engagement from your viewers, or else your channel gets sent straight to the dark, sweaty backlot of obscurity and your funding along with it.
No, he's not. Wirecutter is in fact extremely useful and reliable, in my experience. This one dude is not 100x better than that. Perhaps in some cases he's slightly better, sure. He is obviously not "orders of magnitude" better.
If you take the natural choice of base, e, then "orders of magnitude" would only imply Todd to be 7.39 times better, which he is in many cases — for example, by measuring the self-information of reviews — and he may even cross that threshold in the aggregate.
What you do with information is than your decision.
Best case you know and trust your critics because you align to a certain degree with their experience and movie taste.
For example "now you see me" is a shit movie. Magic in a movie doesn't work and the main hidden character basically breaks the whole movie but apparently the audience loved it.
The Last Jedi is apparently the cultural enrichment film of the decade.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_last_jedi
A better way to view the critic score is, "X% of film critics think this film is worth watching."
And the audience score is: "Y% of moviegoers who leave movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes think this film is worth watching."
This is why Toy Story can get 99% (it's a crowd pleaser), and why daring, impactful films can sometimes get lower scores (they can be polarizing).
> *“The studios didn’t invent Rotten Tomatoes, and most of them don’t like it,” says the filmmaker Paul Schrader. “But the system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don’t go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do.”
...calling the audiences dumb. There are plenty of smart movies that manage to find smart audiences, but for some reason those smart audiences just don't exist when considering his movie. He can't admit to himself that he doesn't make very good movies, so he prefers to think that everybody else is stupid. Blaming audiences is a coping mechanism for bad artists.
This is a single datapoint, but my hypothesis is that political correctness does indeed account for a measurable (beyond noise) portion of a RT score. Marketing spend probably matters more, and genuinely excellent non-PC films (say, Oppenheimer) can succeed without PC, but PC does contribute.
[0]https://fandomwire.com/theyve-been-barely-advertising-it-unt...
They focus first on their political objectives, their political views, and what political issues they wish to advocate for above all else
This has been an increasing trope in modern film and shows.
"The narrative" is now even a meme... The other coded phrase for a "politically correct" film is "re-imagined for a modern audience"
EDIT: Ugh, looks like replier reached for personal attacks, so this thread has sadly derailed into flamewar :( Hitting the eject button.
>There was no campaign speech to elect Biden in the latest Captain America
This is just a stupid statement
>I don't recall anything overtly political in most modern movies.
Snow White, Indian Jones 5, Just about Every Marvel Movie Past infinity War, 2 of the 3 Star Wars Films in the new Trilogy, The Little Mermaid... Shall I go on?
It is more pronounced in TV Shows however, She Hulk, Season 2 and 3 of Witcher, Rings of Power, etc etc etc
>So what exact "narratives" is everyone complaining about?
For starters [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPE7-PRL0M8
This that just just the tip of the ice berg...
That's a list of movies, not an identification of political content in movies.
Recent history has shown us that any narrative can be termed “political” if it helps one side drive a narrative.
Just look at the faux outrage over induction ovens and banning beers. Completely fabricated nonsense used to drive a narrative. This is the true trope.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/osca...
This is an analogy or what I mean by "political correctness" (or related concepts like "wokeness" and "social justice warrior"). Great art communicates truth about the human condition in a beautiful way. This is, of course, open to interpretation, yet somehow many people agree that, for example, The Godfather is a great film. Why? I believe the film shows us some truth about the human condition (particularly our ability to descend into evil) through a gripping story with excellent characters, visuals, dialogue, plotting, etc.
When we substitute an arbitrary checklist of criteria a film must meet that have nothing to do with communicating truth about the human condition in a beautiful way, we are engaging in "political correctness," and we have ceased to value art but instead propaganda. For instance, if we were to use the new Academy standards for Oscar-nominated movies, the Godfather would fail – the cast is almost all white, has no LGBT and IIRC includes the n-word. Amadeus, another excellent film (one of the most praised in Oscar history) would certainly fail, since the cast is all white and almost entirely male, as we would expect from a film set in 18th century Vienna. This does not mean great art cannot have diverse casts, LGBT characters or a lack of "problematic" content. For a recent example, the excellent show Andor ticks almost all of the DEI checkboxes – LGBT character(s), diverse cast –, but it also has smart writing, interesting characters, sensible plots, beautiful visuals and a compelling story. As long as the former are subordinated to the latter, a work remains art and not "politically correct" propaganda. At the same time, Oppenheimer ticks almost none of the DEI checkboxes and yet is arguably one of the best films of this century.
> So instead of using a meaningless euphemism, OP should articulate what exact themes, stories, or characters they think lead to a good critic score?
I think this comment betrays exactly what I'm critiquing. Great art can't be shoved in a box like this. Mediocre art has identifiable flaws - maybe it's visually bland or maybe the dialogue is poor or the characters act in inexplicable ways. These all detract from the beauty and truth of the work.
I'm not sure what FOSS has to do with any of this, so I'll leave that be. For The Godfather, obviously what counts as Great Art is subjective. I think the idea of greatness can change as the public's norms/values change over time. A lot of people look back at classic movies from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and say "Yea that was a great movie for its time, but measured using today's moral yardstick--yow! Some of that stuff is actually not so good."
If The Godfather was made today, who could say whether the cast and crew would be more diverse? It probably would be, at least the crew. Would that make it any better or worse a film? There's no way to know. Maybe the creative leadership positions, financiers, and distribution companies would be more diverse. Would that make it a better or worse movie? Would The Godfather somehow not have been able to show truth about the human condition if its executive producer was black?
Times have changed. "Ticking DEI checkboxes" as you put it, should not be difficult--or even something a studio has to consciously think about. If you're a business or studio and are up all night sweating bullets about "Oh lord how am I going to tick DEI checkboxes," you're doing something fundamentally very, very, very wrong in your business. Your point about Andor supports this: A studio can easily do this (respect the norms of today) and still make a great movie!
Which is kind of inevitable because how else would you choose who becomes a critic other than choosing someone whose idea of quality is at least somewhat close to those of the artists, producers and other critics.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/orville/s01 (critics: 31%, audience: 93%)
vs
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/star_trek_discovery/s01 (critics: 82%, audience: 49%)
(S02 of The Orville got very few but great reviews from the critics, it hadn't really changed much IMO.)
The art world is a _thing_, with tastes that can vary quite a bit from mid-brow average consumers. Its sensitive in its own way to "PC" and lobbying, but is distinct to a degree (albeit entangled, naturally).
Lost me here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It is critic-career suicide to give negative ratings to any girl-power movie, no matter how bad or artistically bankrupt. At the same time, any movie that gets republicans excited (even if it isn't political) will struggle to be certified-fresh on the platform.
> anti-woke”/anti-pc comments
If that's the sentiment, then that's the sentiment. I know it sounds like we've had an influx of new angry redditors. But, a lot of old school HN folks have fundamental disagreements with the woke/pc tent.
I agree that HN should try to avoid culture wars. But not when it is the crux of the very thread we're on.
Oh come on, this is exactly what I’m talking about. No critic worth their salt is afraid to criticize a movie if it’s bad or mediocre.
I remember just recently the “woke” Marvel Eternals getting plenty of sniffy reviews because it was a boring endevour. Ditto for the Ghost Busters remake, Disney live actions etc.
The only thing is that the critics write actual reviews, they don’t just say “I hate the new Little Mermaid because they made Ariel black” like all the anti-woke mouthbreathers on the internet.
Or to put it more clearly: the way you feel about ycombinator comments here is very similar to how some people feel about e.g. LOTR or any other piece of media they otherwise treasure. I should think you might empathize with their position more if your politics weren't so opposed.
Also, people that rate movies online may not be representative of the entire movie-watcher population, so that may be, in some cases, also not a very accurate measurement, unless you yourself are a typical movie rater.
In the gaming world, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare got the most disliked trailer ever on YouTube, and still sold more than 13m copies. Somewhat similarly, logic-devoid, low-quality children movies can get as many dislikes as parents want, children will still watch them.
The point is that commercial success in a variety of industries is a result of a variety of factors, product quality is frequently not the most relevant.
That is: a restaurant owner can correctly say that another restaurant has excellent food and service without that being an endorsement of the restaurant's ability to survive as a business.
I would disagree with the loose correlation point. Although it's just one component of a restaurant's broader strategy for success, quality is undoubtedly crucial. While in Times Square, I would doubt you would blindly choose any restaurant without considering food and service quality.
Also, I would say that while a restaurant owner can correctly evaluate another, it's not necessary implied that specifically an award winner has proven that the unbiased opinions of others put them in this position.
Vulture ran an article on September 2023 that raised criticisms including the fact that since the acquisition by Fandango in 2016, the rules have changed in ways that happen to favor the biggest movies. The article cited publicity company Bunker 15 as an example of how scores can be boosted by recruiting obscure, often self-published reviewers to write positively, or selectively hiding negative reviews, using the example of 2018's Ophelia.
Try searching for barbie movie for an example. Click more reviews and filter by 1 star. The third says:
"Barbie," director and co-writer Greta Gerwig’s summer splash, is a dazzling achievement, both technically and in tone. It’s a visual feast that succeeds as both a gleeful escape and a battle cry. So crammed with impeccable attention to detail is "Barbie” that you couldn’t possibly catch it all in a single sitting; you’d have to devote an entire viewing just to the accessories, for example.
It even says ADVERTISEMENT in capital letters but below the fold where you have to expand the whole review to see it. Despite that this review directly contradicts its star rating, 774 "people" have marked it as helpful.
Scroll down a bit further and there is another, "If this was an item on the McDonald’s menu, it would be everyone’s favourite - the Oreo McFlurry. Hands down, I don’t think I could name a better film. The acting was superb!" which supposedly nearly a thousand people found helpful. This one doesn't say anywhere that it's an ad.
When I first noticed this, almost all the top 1 star reviews were ads. Real users have been correcting it and the top two reviews are now real. The second review says "Update: if you notice google is showing mostly 5 star reviews when there is almost an equal number of 1 stars to 5 stars hence why the average is 3 stars." and the 5th post says "I noticed a few giving spectaculars about the movie but rating it as one star, maybe to drown out the real reviews?" so irate users have been noticing the manipulation too.
It's really very embarrassing for Google. It's gone now but originally when you searched for this movie there was a special pink sparkle effect. So they're paying engineers to write special code just for this movie whilst ignoring obvious fake reviews, claiming they were meta-reviewed by thousands of people and they still haven't cleaned this up even weeks later.
For a mainstream example, take Fast X. It's an objectively stupid movie with a great audience score - because it's exactly what it says on the tin! Nobody is confused about what they're watching. Nobody thinks they're going to get terrific drama or romance or suspense. They're going to get the 9th sequel to a comedy action movie about dudes driving cars.
Blue Beetle: 78% critics, 92% audience
Gran Turismo: 63%, 98%
Elemental: 74%, 93%
Meg 2: 29% 73%
Haunted Mansion 38%, 84%
Indiana Jones: 69%, 88%
Little Mermaid 67%, 94%
Those audience scores are not "more accurate" in any way. People who are forced to see these movies like them less than people who chose to see it.
There also really isn't anything currently that fits into "the political correctness / marketing budget of the movie" claim of OP. It seems like they are just buying into cultural war nonsense. The closest I can find is Barbie and its critic score is 5% higher than the audience score, so not much of a gap.
You rate movies. The consensus ratings you see are based on people who have rated movies similarly to you overall.
My favourite way of judging movie quality is checking what kind of movie goers hate it and why.
-Pretentious watchers hating on summer blockbuster movies
-Political things and review bombs
About your specific example Steam comes to mind, they have a great review timeline feature that allows to filter out review bombs.
One feature that would be nice would be a filter to filter out reviewers based on certain criteria
-only one review
-only has reviews on certain films
-account life is less than specific threshold
That DB query is probably too expensive to run on a free site though. An app that scrapes the RT reviews and filters out based on this criteria has been on my list of things to build.
High Audience Score: HA High Critics Score: HC
HA + HC: Great movie to watch
HA + no HC: An entertainment movie but don’t expect a masterpiece
No HA + HC: Avoid unless you have obscure tastes or if you are pretentious
No HA + No HC: Probably garbage
At a high level what I really want is two ratings: Global rating and does this deliver what it promised. A greasy spoon is objectively not a good restaurant but it scratches an itch and you have certain relatively low expectations of it so in the context of greasy spoons generally I might rate the restaurant 5 stars even if globally I'd give it two stars.
As you say with Fast X: objectively it is not a good movie but it absolutely delivers what it promised. People who like that movie series will be pleased with it so in that context it deserves a positive rating.
As a follow-on I want to tell the system about the things I like + the things I hate. Then I want the system to give more weight to ratings from others who both like and hate the same things. I honestly don't care if critics or audiences liked the movie... I want to know if people who in some way think like me enjoyed it.
83% of critics gave it a positive review on a binary scale. Not an average rating of 83%.
Whereas 38% of audience gave it higher than 3.5 stars.
They aren't exactly comparable.
I knew some LOTR superfans who were upset with the first three Peter Jackson movies only being about a thousand hours long and omitting various plots and characters.. but these people were a minority and most loved the new thing. And then when Jackson made the hobbit movies the reception was very different. The audience didn't change, his new movies just weren't up to the same standard they expected. And if the show is getting hate, I think it's fair to assume that's because the show isn't good either. Maybe it would get better reviews if it were original IP and didn't have Jackson's first three LOTR movies casting a shadow on it, but blaming the fans for this isn't right.
But, it's doubtful I know anyone well enough to ask their opinion on a fantasy series who hasn't read the Silmarillion.
It's a solid C+. Like Wheel of Time or Foundation. Not horrible. Not great either. Not the best take on the source material, but it's fine I guess.
I don't know, I feel like both the people who say it is great and the people who say it is horrible are both wrong. If you would ask me for an opinion, I would say it is a show that I watched.
I was surprised when watching the first episode, after seeing 83% from critics on RT. It did not match my expectations from prior RT scores. I remember one movie that had a 90-something rating from critics and 30-something rating from viewers, whose name I unfortunately can't remember. It was strange, like a C movie from an alternate universe with different tropes. I can imagine being a reviewer, bored to death of the endless rehashes I have to watch, enjoying it because at least it's different. Rings of Power, not so much.
They decided to slap the name on a show that only represented LOTR in name. So, I think they fairly get to receive the backlash of an obvious money grab.
I mean, just to be silly, if we translate it to typical US grade scale… that’s like on the B to B- cusp which seems reasonable for the show.
The formulation is a way to collapse precise scores into a binary classification of thumbsup or thumbsdown. So, another way to put it would be 83% of reviewers 'liked it'
Side note, I used to really like Rotten Tomatoes 10+ years ago but I noticed a drop in quality, likely Goodhart's law in action as some other commenters here have pointed out.
And shows are often reviewed after only a few episodes. Typically two to four episodes are released to reviewers before the premiere, and this is what the review is based on.
So a high rating means most reviewers reacted positively to the first few episodes.
I have seen Rotten Tomatoes apparently just glitch out scores, too. Wheel of Time season one has 94 reviews with 64 positive, which is 68% positive, yet the tomatometer says 81%. Sometimes that is because of the episode-by-episode reviews, which are overwhelmingly from recap blogs that only cover what they like, but even in this case, that doesn't make up the difference.