the magazine headlined Vulture recently an article that caused a lot of fuss. The complex headline makes it very clear how deeply the article delves into the review aggregation site’s problems. However, one single circumstance played a role in public perception: there may have been “purchased reviews.” The article opened with this, but in the end it’s almost just an afterthought. Because The problem of the so-called Tomatometer ‘keeping Hollywood under control’ is completely separate from this and is much bigger.
To explain this, we must first look at the issue of “purchased reviews”. A PR firm took advantage of Hollywood’s largest and most important review aggregation platform, Rotten Tomatoes, opening its doors in recent years and accepting more and more people – from YouTube critics to small bloggers. This already shows a Rotten Tomatoes problem, which we will encounter again later.
The site uses the Tomatometer to measure what percentage of reviews for a film or series are positive. This results in a score from 0 to 100. The ratings are essentially the same. There are a few minor differences in the presentation on the site, but ultimately it makes no difference to the calculation whether a review is from a 20-year veteran at the highly regarded trade magazine Variety or a small-time blogger who works for 50 as hobby where readers write comes from. There are certainly arguments for that, but it was of course the gateway to the alleged manipulation.
For example, a PR company manipulated the Tomatometer for small films
According to Vulture’s exposé article, the PR company allegedly specifically targeted such small-time bloggers and asked them to write positive reviews of individual films. “Dark, often self-published” critics were targeted by the campaignwrites like this yourself, it also makes sense. Critics employed by a renowned magazine would run a lot of risk with such a deal. If that were to happen, they would lose their jobs and their reputation, they would no longer be able to gain a foothold in this profession and they may even have to deal with compensation claims. A PR company probably wouldn’t even approach such people because the risk of them doing something like that would be very high write a research article about the unfair practice than accept such an offer.
Furthermore, the accusations only concern smaller films that were often not widely seen in theaters. The cheap Bruce Willis actor “Gasoline Alley” (see photo) or the historical drama “Ophelia”, which, despite a cast including Daisy Ridley, Naomi Watts and Clive Owen, was also only released on DVD and Blu-ray in Germany, can be seen in the article mentioned as an example.
The reason is clear. For example, the summer’s two big blockbusters, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” each received more than 460 reviews. You probably couldn’t buy that many reviews to manipulate the overall rating based on all those reviews. The PR company, on the other hand, focused on the small films mentioned above because half a dozen positive reviews from these “obscure” bloggers were enough to massively change the Tomato score. After all, there are sometimes only ten reviews here.
This is not to downplay what a scandal it is that Hobby Critics were willing to pay for positive reviews (presumably there was $50) and Rotten Tomatoes also removed individual reviews from the rating after the reveal, but people stayed on the platform. But the real problem with the increasingly important review aggregation site isn’t this little manipulation, it’s much bigger: it’s the Tomatometer itself.
Even without manipulation: that’s why the tomato tester is worthless!
We have repeatedly pointed out in the past that the value of the Tomatometer should be treated with great caution – and that you should know what it stands for. Nevertheless, it has become increasingly important in the US, but also increasingly in the rest of the world. How critically explained, It has long been a hallmark when a film has a particularly high Tomatometer score. It sounds good that a film has a Tomatometer score of 93 – it is immediately considered ‘better’ than a film with, say, a score of 75. But that’s nonsense, because what is the message behind it?
As explained at the beginning, the website uses its Tomatometer to measure what percentage of reviews are positive. So every criticism is put in just two drawers: is it positive or negative? It should be clear to everyone how simplistic this is, how little it corresponds to the potentially complex ideas and statements in a text. But to illustrate it, an example:
- Let’s imagine movie A: Everyone quite likes it. Not exciting, nothing special, you see it, but it’s not really necessary and you immediately forget about it. There are many mediocre to good reviews (these are usually considered positive at RT). Here at FILMSTARTS it might be 2.5 or 3 stars. Film A would probably get a very high Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes, in extreme cases even 100 points.
- Then let’s imagine movie B: it causes great commotion and wild debate. Some celebrate it as a masterpiece, while others testify to the fact that it tried a lot but went too far. He’s really divided. Here at FILMSTARTS there are maybe 4.5 stars. Film B might have a fairly average Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes, maybe 60 points.
But now the honest question: Which movie are you more interested in? Of course the majority of movie B would say thatbut if you just look at the Tomatometer score, you’ll consider movie A one of the must-see movies of the year and ignore movie B completely.
Our call: read the reviews!
Of course, the Tomatometer score is not useless. If a movie has a high percentage of positive reviews, it’s definitely worth taking a closer look. We also often mention the Tomatometer score in articles to indicate that a film is rated positively. But it is important that you do not let the numbers stand alone, understand them, ideally classify them and not consider them just as a seal of quality.
If you really like numbers, you can use other scores. Rotten Tomatoes itself (very hidden) always has the actual average rating of all reviews. The metric of competitor Metacritic, which is better for this reason (and also due to stricter selection), is only based on such an average value. That’s better, but for many reasons it’s still far from the optimal solution. This is another…
In his article he quotes Paul Schrader and Quentin Tarantino, among others, who complain that contemporary audiences are only interested in such figures instead of reading the reviews behind them. We would therefore like to conclude with a call to simply read reviews instead of comparing figures. Of course we would be happy if you did that with us; After all, our critics spend a lot of time on very detailed texts that ideally highlight a wide variety of facets. But even if you do it somewhere else, the important thing is that you do it (instead of just being guided by such numbers).