Obvious to anyone using the site or aware of is ratings, including the author, but it is good to see some analysis as evidence.

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.

RottenTomatoes has been rotten for over a decade. IMDB user ratings are much more useful, but still far from perfect.

Stopped reading when I saw a bar chart being used for correlating critic and audience scores.

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 it will only include people with skin in the game (ie. verified to have paid for a ticket)...except now this has been completely hijacked as well.

Going back to the example of political films now what the right wing does is they have a billionaire finance a film through some intermediary group then free tickets to the movie are given out at conservative events. People books seats to the movie, promote it on social media, post a "Verified Review" and then often don't show up to the screening. I have discovered sold out screenings to some of these movies but when I went to the theater to see some other film, i'd often peek into the screening of these films only to find they are almost empty. The movie plays regardless of if someone shows up or not. Furthermore some of these films actually have a code that they show at the end of the film to gift a free ticket to a friend so the box office numbers of these films are inflated and its all a bunch of hogwash.

Like I said its hopeless. In a way we saw the rise of this new fake world play out in Hollywood before it took over social media and the rest of the internet now. How will it end? People trusting only what they already know they like or from trusted friends and everything else is ignored.

This article has got me thinking of an interesting idea though: What if we go and determine which of the critics are known to provide reviews that reflect our tastes (maybe by reading reviews of movies that we enjoyed), then pull only those review data and compute a new Tomato score based only on those critics? We could toss the Rotten Tomatoes tomato meter in the trash and get back to a legitimate review that you could use as a positive signal again.

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

There are many metrics that can be sampled, many challenges to normalization.

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

> 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.

Also, 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 funny but the plot makes no fucking sense and has a million holes. And if you see a comedy with 95% critic but 70% audience, you might chuckle a few times for the whole movie at best but it will be thought provoking and well done.