If you’ve ever relied on movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes ratings to judge whether or not to go see a new release, you may want to rethink that …
A Vulture report says that ratings are influenced by paid-for reviews on tiny blogs, with movie companies paying their owners to write positive ones.
While most film-PR companies aim to get the attention of critics from top publications, Bunker 15 takes a more bottom-up approach, recruiting obscure, often self-published critics who are nevertheless part of the pool tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. In another break from standard practice, several critics say, Bunker 15 pays them $50 or more for each review.
The piece cites an example of a movie whose Rotten Tomatoes rating was changed from Rotten to Fresh by the addition of seven positive reviews, mostly from bloggers who had reviewed other Bunker 15 films. The author of a negative review said that the company asked him to change it to a positive one, while it suggested to another writer that he hide any negative review on a separate blog not searched by Rotten Tomatoes.
The reason this works is because the aggregator makes no distinction between notable critics from major publications, and the smallest of amateur blogs.
Its math stinks. Scores are calculated by classifying each review as either positive or negative and then dividing the number of positives by the total. That’s the whole formula. Every review carries the same weight whether it runs in a major newspaper or a Substack with a dozen subscribers.
Movie studios can also hold pre-release screenings to which they invite only those critics they think will write positive reviews. That will ensure an initial high Rotten Tomatoes score, even if the movie is blasted in subsequent reviews. By then, it’s done its job.
For example, in February, the Tomatometer score for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania debuted at 79 percent based on its first batch of reviews. Days later, after more critics had weighed in, its rating sank into the 40s. But the gambit may have worked. Quantumania had the best opening weekend of any movie in the Ant-Man series, at $106 million. In its second weekend, with its rottenness more firmly established, the film’s grosses slid 69 percent, the steepest drop-off in Marvel history.
Studios also know that those who attend film festivals will often get caught up in the excitement of the event, and give more favorable reviews than those watching in movie theaters. In one case, a movie premiered at a festival, got 100% positive reviews, and the studio then declined to arrange any subsequent screenings because it wanted to use that score on the posters.
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