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The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes: The most overrated metric in movies is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked — and yet has Hollywood in its grip. (www.vulture.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

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.

I don't get any of this, really. MetaCritic and IMDB are also huge, and use alternate weighting systems, I believe. You can also just google the movie and underneath the 'big three reviewers,' there'll be a bunch more quality review sites, like NYT, The Guardian, Ebert's site and so forth.

So for anyone who wants to get a spectrum of opinions, it's really not that hard. Not unlike how one should get reliable news.

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