Studios Are Pissed With ‘Rotten Tomatoes’

An article appeared recently at Deadline, which revealed that certain bigwigs are less than happy with the influence that ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ is having on movies.  According to their sources, some studios are even seeking an end to pre-screening.

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 Fandango (which owns RT) is an even bigger problem.

Both Pirates 5 and Baywatch started high on tracking four weeks ago, $90M-$100M over four and $50M over five days respectively, and the minute Rotten Tomatoes hit, those estimates collapsed. Over the weekend, I heard that some studio insiders want to hold off critic screenings until opening day or cancel them all together (that’s pretty ambitious and would cause much ire, we’ll see if that ever happens). Already, studios and agencies are studying RT scores’ impact on advance ticket sales and tracking.

“There’s just not a great date on the calendar to open a poorly reviewed movie,” said one studio marketing vet this morning.

Once, I thought that getting this site on RT might increase its traffic.  But I did some research and found that many of the ‘critic’ sites on there were getting 50-200 views a week, some with 10 views a week, this despite being on RT (on a good week here, we’d have 50,000, once last year it was 300,000). That proved two things; RT will accept the ‘verdicts’ of people whose opinion nobody values, and secondly, RT provides fuck all traffic, evident by those I mentioned being stone dead with regards to readership.

So maybe they have a point.  A movie’s prospects on the big screen (or maybe an older movie newly released on Blu-Ray) can be altered by ‘critics’ accepted to RT who have reviews which are read by no-one, and often containing verdicts that are politically motivated and comprised of a 75% synopsis and 25% analysis.