cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23769430
All of this would be one thing if Rotten Tomatoes were merely an innocent relic from Web 1.0 being preyed upon by Hollywood sharks. But the site has come a long way from its founding, in 1998, by UC Berkeley grads, one of whom wanted a place to catalogue reviews of Jackie Chan movies. Rotten Tomatoes outlasted the dot-com bubble and was passed from one buyer to another, most recently in 2016. That year, Warner Bros. sold most of it to Fandango, which shares a parent company with Universal Pictures. If it sounds like a conflict of interest for a movie-review aggregator to be owned by two companies that make movies and another that sells tickets to them, it probably is.
If you found this of interest, check out the related article: Online Reviews Are Being Bought and Paid For. Get Used to It
Archive link: https://archive.ph/lyddW
I’ve noticed this phenomenon in many systems. People glom onto the only entity bothering to do benchmarks/reviews/ratings/whatever, or at least the only popular one, even if the system is totally bogus. Because where else are you gonna go?
In this case I think rotten tomatoes has done a reasonable job of pleasing a lot of people. Separating out audience and critics allows producers to point to their well received movies, regular people can know if they will enjoy it, people who love controversial movies can accuse others of review bombing… everyone gets to have their own version of events and rotten tomatoes gets to be the source everyone points to.
Still, they should improve the ratings algorithm.
It would be a benefit to the audience and critics, just not a benefit to the company or movie studios I guess.