In a nutshell: 1) Fandango buys rotten tomatoes in 2016, 2) they expand/widen the critic reviewer pool to include nobody bloggers, and then 3) movie studios court/bribe small fish reviewers to inflate their scores so they can get the fresh rating as a marketing point for their latest flick.
Nice to finally have this all spelled out. I’ve been burned several times over the last few years watching movies with like 79% ratings on RT that I thought sucked. Now I know why.
What’s the alternative? IMDB is owned by Amazon and has a super dumb recency bias. I use Letterboxd and that might be the best at the moment. But the user base there is smaller and sometimes it feels like the only people reviewing movies are the select few who went out of their way to watch it so they are inherently skewed to like it.
The binary of fresh/not fresh has always been problematic too. It takes away nuance and rewards palatable mass market movies that most people like but that aren’t polarizing enough to be interesting.
If you’re just looking for a number that tells you if the movie is worth watching, I bet Letterboxd is a good source. I don’t write reviews, but I’ll add a rating for every movie I watch. Partly because that’s the easiest way to tract my movies. I bet many do that.
This is why I don’t go to aggregate sites like this for reviews. I only ever listen to opinions from youtubers I’ve found online who have similar likes and dislikes as myself. Now I’ve got a tight cluster of people who can help me get a good gage on if I’ll like something or not. It isn’t perfect, but it works.
There is still the audience score and the top critics score. This will need to be looked at specifically but shouldn’t have the same issues as the overall ranking. If that section is useless except for marketing just ignore it
In a nutshell: 1) Fandango buys rotten tomatoes in 2016, 2) they expand/widen the critic reviewer pool to include nobody bloggers, and then 3) movie studios court/bribe small fish reviewers to inflate their scores so they can get the fresh rating as a marketing point for their latest flick.
Nice to finally have this all spelled out. I’ve been burned several times over the last few years watching movies with like 79% ratings on RT that I thought sucked. Now I know why.
What’s the alternative? IMDB is owned by Amazon and has a super dumb recency bias. I use Letterboxd and that might be the best at the moment. But the user base there is smaller and sometimes it feels like the only people reviewing movies are the select few who went out of their way to watch it so they are inherently skewed to like it.
The binary of fresh/not fresh has always been problematic too. It takes away nuance and rewards palatable mass market movies that most people like but that aren’t polarizing enough to be interesting.
But those are easy enough to filter yourself just by knowing what the movie is about.
If you’re just looking for a number that tells you if the movie is worth watching, I bet Letterboxd is a good source. I don’t write reviews, but I’ll add a rating for every movie I watch. Partly because that’s the easiest way to tract my movies. I bet many do that.
Yup that’s what I do now as well 👍
This is why I don’t go to aggregate sites like this for reviews. I only ever listen to opinions from youtubers I’ve found online who have similar likes and dislikes as myself. Now I’ve got a tight cluster of people who can help me get a good gage on if I’ll like something or not. It isn’t perfect, but it works.
There is still the audience score and the top critics score. This will need to be looked at specifically but shouldn’t have the same issues as the overall ranking. If that section is useless except for marketing just ignore it