The Latest News About Rotten Tomatoes Shouldn't Surprise You - Opinion
From Gaius Bolling
This week the industry was rocked by the least surprising news to hit the media in quite some time. An in-depth report coming to us courtesy of Vulture revealed that a PR firm called Bunker 15 started paying low-level critics on the website to post positive reviews for a mere $50. The film that was mentioned in this scheme was the Daisy Ridley drama Ophelia, which hit the site with a rotten score of 46 percent. Once some critics lined their pockets, Ophelia was suddenly deemed fresh at 62 percent, which looks better to potential movie watchers. But should any of this be surprising to you? Sadly, for those of us working in this industry, it was like telling us the sky is blue, but what COULD come out of this is a tighter look at a website with way too much control regarding a film's potential performance.
For those of you who don't know, Rotten Tomatoes is a review-aggregation website for film and television. Once a film is added to the site and that review embargo is lifted, critics deemed worthy to be certified critics for the site post their respective reviews on their platforms and then they are then sent to Rotten Tomatoes. If the review is positive, it gets the bright red tomato for fresh; if the review is negative, it gets the ugly green splat for rotten. This is then turned into a percentage based on the number of positive and negative reviews. If your film is 80 percent fresh, that means 80 percent of the critics who posted reviews on the site gave the movie a positive review. Like some have said, it's essentially the Yelp for movies and it has really become a barometer for what casual moviegoers tend to see.
The idea behind Rotten Tomatoes isn't bad. If used for good, it could be a fun little collection of reviews and a platform to highlight critics in an industry where they all don't get mainstream notoriety. It's the kind of website that could very well be used for good but a few bad apples, or rotten tomatoes for the sake of this piece, have made it a very ugly place.
News that a PR firm could pay to manipulate a Rotten Tomatoes score may not be surprising but it's disappointing. It shows that the site doesn't really properly vet some of its reviews which makes it easy to game the system. It also tarnishes any credibility the site might have, which is already pretty slim considering many people believe moviegoers shouldn't give the site any weight at all. The problem is, so many saw how easy it could be to sway a Rotten Tomatoes score and didn't need a Vulture expose to confirm that. In a statement, Rotten Tomatoes told Vulture that they take "the integrity of our scores seriously and does not tolerate any attempts to manipulate them." That's all well and good but the site has been very quiet about this since the story broke and hasn't publicly declared what action they plan on taking to make it right.
If you were to ask most in the industry, they might tell you that Rotten Tomatoes is a bit of an embarrassment to the profession of film criticism because it dumbs down a film's quality to a pretty slim grading format. If you dive deep into certain reviews, you'd be surprised how one review ended up positive and another negative. You could read a completely glowing review of a film with one glaring criticism and it's deemed rotten. On the other hand, a review that seems primarily negative with a notice of a few solid performances could be deemed fresh. There doesn't appear to be a real metric as to how this is decided which is why so many have turned a side-eye to the site in recent years.
Also in question is how their critics are chosen. I'm not one to say who should be there and who shouldn't. We're all trying to make it in the world of entertainment journalism and for some of the good ones, being a Rotten Tomatoes certified film critic is a real professional win. However, in a desire to have more diverse voices on the site, Rotten Tomatoes has opened up its criteria for who is accepted and that is where I believe the vetting process has failed. A more detailed look into a film critic's work some be examined until they are deemed acceptable to join. Look at the integrity of their reviews and try to notice a pattern of glowingly positive reviews towards one studio over another, for example. If they can detect a lack of honesty in the reviews, they shouldn't be allowed to join the site.
The reason why a PR firm would try to game the system of Rotten Tomatoes is because it has become so influential when it comes to what people will see and how films are marketed. TV spots for films will flash their fresh score across the screen nowadays, something that wasn't so commonplace a few years ago. It's a great marketing tool for the studio and it's also important to the consumer. It can make or break a decision to go to the movies and see a certain project, especially if they are on the fence about it. They look at that percentage as a game-time decision on how they will spend their money for the weekend. Will they see the film on the big screen, wait for it to it VOD, or not even see it at all?
I honestly don't think a site like Rotten Tomatoes should go away. It's not the only aggregator site out there with Metacritic also being a big one but I do think they need to have more accountability. For instance, once those critics who took money for reviews are identified, they should be banned from the site and not allowed to have their reviews showcased. That would go a long way to show they're trying to do the right thing moving forward. I also think we have our own responsibility when it comes to Rotten Tomatoes. Instead of just viewing a basic score, actually read through some of these reviews before making a movie-watching decision or, here's a thought, see a movie because you want to despite its score, positive or negative. It's crazy that this site has so much power over general consumption but maybe it's time to take some of that power back.
