I will say that when I used to go to the theaters, which was before the pandemic and I started a family I used metacritic.
I found that any time I went to something that was red, I absolutley regretted it and it was terrible. Yellow was more hit or miss and top green scores were pretty good.
Exceptions were comedy where a lower score could still mean a good film, and politics oriented films, where a bad film with a media approved message could get a really good score even if it sucked.
It’s sad to not get a reliable indicator of that and someone should just resurrect the old score and call it Bad Apples. Since the actual score seems transparent, why not develop a competitor.
Would there be some selection bias as well? As info about movies becomes readily available, generally the people who go see movies would have decided that they would probably enjoy said movie, and write favourable reviews
Regardless of the introduction of sycophantic reviewers, the 3/5 = fresh thing has always been a pretty half-ass threshold imo, and that a fact that a film can be "100% fresh" on RT on the basis of every single reviewer saying "yeah it's nothing special but it's fine, 3 stars" is fairly easy to misinterpret.
It’s interesting that people pay close attention to one-size-fits all number (regardless of the pros and cons of the methodology used to derive said number). I find RT really useful for collating the reviews from “top” reviewers in one place: over the years, I know how my interests align with the tastes of particular reviewers, and I don’t have to look in multiple places to get a snapshot view of their opinions.
Its absolutely hopeless. The rankings are gamed because Rotten Tomato still carries some semblance of credibility (although in this post Trump winning era, sources of credibility can get eroded more quickly)
It does not get clearer than when a political movie comes out. 2018 was an interesting year, two movies came out that really allowed me to get a clearer picture of what was going on: "Knock Down The House" and "Death of a Nation".
When "Knock Down The House" (documentary featuring the leftwing US politician AOC) came out, I got interested in scraping the data off of Rotten Tomatoes and studying it.
Before making any moves, I first watched the movie for myself in a theater (and also got to see a live Q&A with the director to understand her thought process)
The movie had at the time a 100% rating from critics and ~80% from viewers. After watching it, I would concur with the viewer ranking but felt that the critic ranking was unusually high. Seriously? 100%? (It has now gone down to 99% but still). In regards to the viewer ranking I conceded that I was probably biased which is why I also ran this experiment on Death of a Nation (also saw in theaters but to a room with only one other moviegoer).
Knock Down the House eventually got featured on Tucker Carlson like a year after release(I think it coincided with Netflix making it free on youtube). I watched in realtime how the movie critic score kept going down and down and down to where it is now (11%). Dumping the scraped data, I ran a simple analysis and discovered a large portion of the people ranked it with no comments, or simplistic things like how stupid AOC is and many had had no other ratings other than this movie or the only other film is the one featuring Illhan Omar (another politician hated by the right).
For Death of a nation, the scores were flipped. A whopping 0% in the critic score(12 reviews) while the user score stood at a respectable 87% (again at the time when I did my scraping yet again we saw tons of 1 movie reviewers). Yeah the movie royally sucked and was painful to watch but 0%? That was a bit fishy. This essentially killed any credibility that I had in Rotten Tomatoes.
I started to trust places like /r/movies and /r/AMCsAList only to get burned by that as well when movies recommended in the comments would end up being terrible and then when I went back to criticize the films, I would get criticized and downvoted to non visible status. It was not a definite signal but gave me the feeling that there is a lot of astroturfing going on there as well.
Furthermore, these movies promoted on Reddit would typically be in 3/5 range on Rotten tomatoes which further made me think there is no real way to get a real signal if a film is likely to be good or not.
What I started to do was not a great metric but has helped cut down on the cruft: Follow specific actors/directors I really liked and ones that I felt were in it to make good films. As an example, actresses like Mary Elizabeth Winstead have turned down big roles in favor of indie films or other interesting scripts to the detriment of her career but the films have been more enjoyable and interesting. In each film I also find other actors to follow and if I start to see more studio promotion of a specific person (for example Anya Taylor Joy after The Queens Gambit) I start to caution away and sometimes just drop that actor from the list. In her case I stuck to films she worked with other people that I determined I liked(like Edgar Wright) before feeling like there is too much promotion going on and just dropping her from the list. Other than this, I fill out my list with franchises I like or subjects that I always give a chance to (science/space, etc.).
I know I am leaving out a lot of potential good films but the noise has become unbearable to the point where I don't want to waste my time anymore.
A few years later Rotten Tomatoes introduced "Verified Reviews". I thought this will be amazing as now i...
I just attend my local independent cinema. Sometimes I’m blown away. Sometimes the film sucks, but there are only 3-4 options at any given time. Simplifies the decision, and at the very least, they serve beer.
I only rely on IMDb scores and they're still reliable if enough time has passed since the movie release. A movie with more than 6 avg is usually enjoyable, while below 6 is not worth watching. Over 7 is usually very good, over 8 is a masterpiece
I agree wholeheartedly. What none of the review sites have figured out is how to adjust TV show user scores so that they don't score so much higher than movies.
is a listing of 2019 movie torrents ranked by seeds (number of clients holding full copies of a torrent version).
A normalization challenge is to group torrent variations (1080p rips and 720p rips and WEB-DL's and BluRay and etc.) and tally up and rank interest in various films over time.
Clearly Ne Zha (2019), a Chinese Animation, Fantasy, Adventure movie was a global pirate star of that year .. should it be "normalized" by population of country of origin to smooth out the home team having a billion+ in population "bias" ?
One advantage of ranking films by year and pirate copies is it provides a pragmatic measure of "staying power"
My Fair Lady, Dr Strangelove, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Mary Poppins, A Fistful of Dollars, and Goldfinger are still being hoarded 60 years after their release.
> To account for this influx of reviewers, Rotten Tomatoes has created a "Top Critic" designation reserved for established media outlets, such as The New York Times and The Atlantic. However, this label has no special bearing on a film's top-line Tomatometer score and is largely incorporated into ancillary aspects of the site.
Just last night, I noticed that I could access the two percentage scores for critic reviews.
If you go to "https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_dilemma", and click on the critic reviews percentage (25%), you get a popup that lets you select between seeing the All Critics score (25%) and Top Critics score (28%).
(And if I'd thought to check Rotten Tomatoes first, when selecting what looked like a fun light comedy on Netflix, I wouldn't have wasted an hour of my life before I said WTF, checked RT, and continued to be in a bad mood.)
Incidentally, I'd love to have the Tomatometer score integrated into my UI for video streaming services. The services seem to instead like to use their own very generous scoring instead. (When they show any score at all. Some like to suppress the ratings for new shows they produced, presumably to avoid shooting down their own poor shows before people watch them by default.) But Rotten Tomatoes is a much better predictor of how I'll like a show than the streaming service scores are. But maybe the streaming services don't want to expose that the majority of the movies and series offered at any time now range from mediocre to outright bad.
I still miss the times when I would decide to watch a movie based on the cover at the VHS store or based on a recommendation. Much faster, way more serendipity.
I find RT scores very accurate but not the raw score.
What I mean is that a 70% score is meaningless to me. I need to know the movie genre, the audience score, the age of the movie and then I basically do a “lookup table” in my head. And I have that lookup table because I’ve looked up every movie I’ve watched on RT for 15 years so I know how the scores correlate to my own personal opinions.
As an example: the author said that critic scores should align with audience scores but no that’s not true at all. Critics tend to care more about plot continuity, plot depth and details while the audience tends to care about enjoyability. Both are important to me so I always look at both scores. That’s why a lot of very funny comedies have a 60-69% critic score but a 90%-100% audience score — because it’s hilarious but the plot makes no fucking sense and has a million holes. And if you see a comedy with 95% critic but 70% audience, it will be thought-provoking and well done but don’t expect more than occasional chuckles.
The last comedy that I saw that matches your description is American Fiction. It didn’t feature too many laugh out loud moments, but it was thought provoking and well done. And yet, 93% from critics and 95% from audiences.
I wonder if audiences can appreciate these movies more than you give them credit for?
Let’s try a few more
- Death of Stalin (94%, 79%) has the pattern you’ve predicted.
- O Brother Where Art Thou? (78%, 89%) has the opposite of the pattern.
- Grand Budapest Hotel (92%, 87%) was appreciated by both, like American Fiction.
I’m just not seeing a pattern here. Looking at comedies that fit your description the critics and audience scores don’t follow a predictable 95%, 70% pattern.
Additionally there are movies who just have something unique to them that a niche audience may love, but both critics and the general audience treat them more harshly.
The truth is that other peoples opinion may or may not be a good proxy for your own taste in movies, even if it was uncorrupted and independent.
I generally find IMDB user scores far more reliable and granular for movies. There is a noticeable jump in a movie's quality when it gets a 6.x rating (okay), versus a 7.x (great) versus an 8.x (a Top 500 of all time).
Metacritic is the next most useful, while Rotten Tomatoes is easily the least useful. High critical and user RT reviews often does not provide a good intensity barometer of how good the film actually is. The last ten years I went from being a loyal RT user to completely ignoring their scores altogether.
Something I thought you might get into would be series, whether movies or TV / sequels. Sometimes they get devoted fans who love the whole series, and those sequels or later season have great scores, but you might not enjoy them whatsoever.
My example would be a TV show, A Discovery of Witches which is overall well-received, but I couldn't enjoy at all. Perhaps if you read the books, you'll like the show, but for me, it was such an empty show, devoid of excitement or intrigue or entertainment value.
In my experience of film reviews, Rotten Tomatoes high positive scores are not always representative of how entertaining some content will be.. However, the negative skew is almost always accurate for how bad something will be for all viewers.
The bimodal distribution of professional critics versus community opinions obviously describes what is happening behind the data. Recycled AstroTurf for 1980's cult films have little appeal to modern viewers even with maximal pandering for nostalgia.
Good Hollywood writers likely starved to death, and were replaced with LLM interpreted Nielsen Media Research data. Most video games offer better writing now... lol =3
Highly recommend MovieLens if you have eclectic or niche movie tastes. It can be a bit of a nerd-snipe though. One of my favorites activities is rating movies and watching the recommended ratings (what rating it thinks I'll give a movie) update overnight.
It's at the very least, better than average chance at predicting which movies you will like.
> Humanity Has Stopped Producing Bad Art: After a century of trial and error, mankind has perfected the art of cinema, as proven by recent masterworks like Cats, Space Jam: A New Legacy, the live-action Snow White, Red One, and Joker: Folie à Deux. Critics, who were once joyless automatons thriving on takedowns of human creativity, now bask in this golden age of moviemaking, lavishing praise upon the timeless artistry of The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros. Discovery.
This really should appear in professional film reviews.
51 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 74.5 ms ] threadI found that any time I went to something that was red, I absolutley regretted it and it was terrible. Yellow was more hit or miss and top green scores were pretty good.
Exceptions were comedy where a lower score could still mean a good film, and politics oriented films, where a bad film with a media approved message could get a really good score even if it sucked.
It’s sad to not get a reliable indicator of that and someone should just resurrect the old score and call it Bad Apples. Since the actual score seems transparent, why not develop a competitor.
It does not get clearer than when a political movie comes out. 2018 was an interesting year, two movies came out that really allowed me to get a clearer picture of what was going on: "Knock Down The House" and "Death of a Nation".
When "Knock Down The House" (documentary featuring the leftwing US politician AOC) came out, I got interested in scraping the data off of Rotten Tomatoes and studying it.
Before making any moves, I first watched the movie for myself in a theater (and also got to see a live Q&A with the director to understand her thought process)
The movie had at the time a 100% rating from critics and ~80% from viewers. After watching it, I would concur with the viewer ranking but felt that the critic ranking was unusually high. Seriously? 100%? (It has now gone down to 99% but still). In regards to the viewer ranking I conceded that I was probably biased which is why I also ran this experiment on Death of a Nation (also saw in theaters but to a room with only one other moviegoer).
Knock Down the House eventually got featured on Tucker Carlson like a year after release(I think it coincided with Netflix making it free on youtube). I watched in realtime how the movie critic score kept going down and down and down to where it is now (11%). Dumping the scraped data, I ran a simple analysis and discovered a large portion of the people ranked it with no comments, or simplistic things like how stupid AOC is and many had had no other ratings other than this movie or the only other film is the one featuring Illhan Omar (another politician hated by the right).
For Death of a nation, the scores were flipped. A whopping 0% in the critic score(12 reviews) while the user score stood at a respectable 87% (again at the time when I did my scraping yet again we saw tons of 1 movie reviewers). Yeah the movie royally sucked and was painful to watch but 0%? That was a bit fishy. This essentially killed any credibility that I had in Rotten Tomatoes.
I started to trust places like /r/movies and /r/AMCsAList only to get burned by that as well when movies recommended in the comments would end up being terrible and then when I went back to criticize the films, I would get criticized and downvoted to non visible status. It was not a definite signal but gave me the feeling that there is a lot of astroturfing going on there as well.
Furthermore, these movies promoted on Reddit would typically be in 3/5 range on Rotten tomatoes which further made me think there is no real way to get a real signal if a film is likely to be good or not.
What I started to do was not a great metric but has helped cut down on the cruft: Follow specific actors/directors I really liked and ones that I felt were in it to make good films. As an example, actresses like Mary Elizabeth Winstead have turned down big roles in favor of indie films or other interesting scripts to the detriment of her career but the films have been more enjoyable and interesting. In each film I also find other actors to follow and if I start to see more studio promotion of a specific person (for example Anya Taylor Joy after The Queens Gambit) I start to caution away and sometimes just drop that actor from the list. In her case I stuck to films she worked with other people that I determined I liked(like Edgar Wright) before feeling like there is too much promotion going on and just dropping her from the list. Other than this, I fill out my list with franchises I like or subjects that I always give a chance to (science/space, etc.).
I know I am leaving out a lot of potential good films but the noise has become unbearable to the point where I don't want to waste my time anymore.
A few years later Rotten Tomatoes introduced "Verified Reviews". I thought this will be amazing as now i...
eg: https://ext.to/browse/?sort=seeds&order=desc&cat=1&q=2019
is a listing of 2019 movie torrents ranked by seeds (number of clients holding full copies of a torrent version).
A normalization challenge is to group torrent variations (1080p rips and 720p rips and WEB-DL's and BluRay and etc.) and tally up and rank interest in various films over time.
Clearly Ne Zha (2019), a Chinese Animation, Fantasy, Adventure movie was a global pirate star of that year .. should it be "normalized" by population of country of origin to smooth out the home team having a billion+ in population "bias" ?
One advantage of ranking films by year and pirate copies is it provides a pragmatic measure of "staying power"
https://ext.to/browse/?sort=seeds&order=desc&cat=1&q=1964
My Fair Lady, Dr Strangelove, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Mary Poppins, A Fistful of Dollars, and Goldfinger are still being hoarded 60 years after their release.
* https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/615453
* https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ne_zha
Just last night, I noticed that I could access the two percentage scores for critic reviews.
If you go to "https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_dilemma", and click on the critic reviews percentage (25%), you get a popup that lets you select between seeing the All Critics score (25%) and Top Critics score (28%).
(And if I'd thought to check Rotten Tomatoes first, when selecting what looked like a fun light comedy on Netflix, I wouldn't have wasted an hour of my life before I said WTF, checked RT, and continued to be in a bad mood.)
Incidentally, I'd love to have the Tomatometer score integrated into my UI for video streaming services. The services seem to instead like to use their own very generous scoring instead. (When they show any score at all. Some like to suppress the ratings for new shows they produced, presumably to avoid shooting down their own poor shows before people watch them by default.) But Rotten Tomatoes is a much better predictor of how I'll like a show than the streaming service scores are. But maybe the streaming services don't want to expose that the majority of the movies and series offered at any time now range from mediocre to outright bad.
What I mean is that a 70% score is meaningless to me. I need to know the movie genre, the audience score, the age of the movie and then I basically do a “lookup table” in my head. And I have that lookup table because I’ve looked up every movie I’ve watched on RT for 15 years so I know how the scores correlate to my own personal opinions.
As an example: the author said that critic scores should align with audience scores but no that’s not true at all. Critics tend to care more about plot continuity, plot depth and details while the audience tends to care about enjoyability. Both are important to me so I always look at both scores. That’s why a lot of very funny comedies have a 60-69% critic score but a 90%-100% audience score — because it’s hilarious but the plot makes no fucking sense and has a million holes. And if you see a comedy with 95% critic but 70% audience, it will be thought-provoking and well done but don’t expect more than occasional chuckles.
High critic score / low audience score = Paid-for hype, or politically motivated reviews
Low critic score / high audience score = Possibly a good movie
Low critic score / low audience score = Bad
I wonder if audiences can appreciate these movies more than you give them credit for?
Let’s try a few more
- Death of Stalin (94%, 79%) has the pattern you’ve predicted.
- O Brother Where Art Thou? (78%, 89%) has the opposite of the pattern.
- Grand Budapest Hotel (92%, 87%) was appreciated by both, like American Fiction.
I’m just not seeing a pattern here. Looking at comedies that fit your description the critics and audience scores don’t follow a predictable 95%, 70% pattern.
Additionally, I think someone could build an interesting RT browser based on these kinds of insights.
The truth is that other peoples opinion may or may not be a good proxy for your own taste in movies, even if it was uncorrupted and independent.
Metacritic is the next most useful, while Rotten Tomatoes is easily the least useful. High critical and user RT reviews often does not provide a good intensity barometer of how good the film actually is. The last ten years I went from being a loyal RT user to completely ignoring their scores altogether.
My example would be a TV show, A Discovery of Witches which is overall well-received, but I couldn't enjoy at all. Perhaps if you read the books, you'll like the show, but for me, it was such an empty show, devoid of excitement or intrigue or entertainment value.
A great movie that met the wrong audience, will reasonably get a low score.
The bimodal distribution of professional critics versus community opinions obviously describes what is happening behind the data. Recycled AstroTurf for 1980's cult films have little appeal to modern viewers even with maximal pandering for nostalgia.
Good Hollywood writers likely starved to death, and were replaced with LLM interpreted Nielsen Media Research data. Most video games offer better writing now... lol =3
It's at the very least, better than average chance at predicting which movies you will like.
This really should appear in professional film reviews.
Anything that's 7+ is generally good, anything below that is flawed. The Tomato meter just comes off as random and an unreliable indicator for me.