Monday, June 5, 2017

"Movie studios are blaming Rotten Tomatoes for killing movies no one wants to see"

Via Reddit:  Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Baywatch were never going to be critical darlings. The former is the fifth film in a franchise that should have been retired years ago, if Hollywood had any mercy at all. And the other is an action-comedy about lifeguards. Enough said. Both movies led the domestic box office to its worst Memorial Day weekend showing in nearly 20 years.
In the fallout, are Hollywood producers blaming the writers? The actors? Themselves? (Of course not.) No, they are reportedly blaming Rotten Tomatoes.
They say the movie-review site, which forces critics to assign either a rotten or fresh tomato to each title when submitting reviews, regardless of the nuances of their critiques, poisoned viewers against the films before they were released. Deadline reported that:
Insiders close to both films blame Rotten Tomatoes, with Pirates 5 and Baywatch respectively earning 32% and 19% Rotten. The critic aggregation site increasingly is slowing down the potential business of popcorn movies. Pirates 5 and Baywatch aren’t built for critics but rather general audiences, and once upon a time these types of films — a family adventure and a raunchy R-rated comedy — were critic-proof. Many of those in the industry severely question how Rotten Tomatoes computes the its ratings, and the fact that these scores run on [the movie-ticket buying site] Fandango (which owns RT) is an even bigger problem.
As of four weeks ago, Pirates was reportedly expected to rake in $90-$100 million over the four-day holiday, and Baywatch was projected to gross $50 million over five days. Those estimates were slashed after the Rotten Tomatoes scores posted. (In the end, Pirates made $77 million and Baywatch grossed $23 million in the US and Canada.) But Dwayne Johnson, who stars in Baywatch, publicly called out critics and then schooled them on movie economics.

(Link to more)

11 comments:

chickelit said...

Yawn

Hollywood will always make turkeys. And there will always be scapegoats.

edutcher said...

Movies are inspired by computer games, comic books, old TV shows, amusement park rides, and toys.

Or the wet dreams of SJWs.

And they're blaming the reviewers?

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I check rotten tomatoes before watching anything, which hasn't been that much for some time now.

ampersand said...

Why didn't they blame the racists? When in doubt blame the racists.

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

I thought Hollywood was pro choice?

Leland said...

It's a dog eat dog world.

Amartel said...

The solution would be to improve the product except the product is shoddy by design. Good product is costlier, or at least that's the assumption, and the foreign market has lower standards.

Methadras said...

Studios have always been in the habit of giving odious films a lot of money in the hopes they can at least break even, but get their even more odious messages onto the eyeballs and brains of the hopelessly stupid. Stop making shitty films and you won't have a rotten tomato problem.

Amartel said...

The shitty lefty political movies are the price Hollywood pays for their tax cuts and subsidies. Everyone takes a pay cut on those but they get good press so it evens out.

Trooper York said...

My greatest hope is that California secedes and we set up a big wall around it to keep Hollywood in and tax the shit out of their product.

Trooper York said...

I only watch movies when they are free on TV.

Even then they are usually pretty boring.