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IGN | Rotten Tomatoes Under Fire After PR Firm's Scheme to Pay Critics for Positive Reviews Uncovered (www.ign.com)

submitted 11 months ago by TheSparrowPrince@lemmy.world to c/moviesandtv@lemmy.film

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[-] TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee 122 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

And another site is enveloped by shitifacation.

Edit: ENshittifacation. Apparently, shitifacation is where an airline loses all of your luggage, lol

[-] cmbabul@lemmy.world 66 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Remember IMDB in the early 00s? It was all you needed from what it set out to be. I recently went back to grab some lists for automation and holy shit it’s a wasteland of bullshit. I can’t imagine getting lost in it for hours learning about movies and deciding what I wanted to watch next if it was what it has become

[-] KillAllPoorPeople@lemmy.world 41 points 11 months ago

I really loved IMDb back in the day. While the user ratings weren't perfect, there used to be a formula you could use to figure out the worthiness of a movie to watch. Now (10 years or so), IMDb user ratings are inundated with conservatives and older generations who tend to rate based on their fragile feelings rather than on how watchable a movie is.

[-] TrenchcoatFullofBats@belfry.rip 26 points 11 months ago

conservatives and older generations who tend to rate based on their fragile feelings

"Woke" doesn't mean what you think it means, JesusLittleKidLover88, and it certainly doesn't apply to Crank 2.

[-] AZERTY@feddit.nl 16 points 11 months ago

Don't forget the anime weirdos voting against incredibly popular shows so their anime can be the best one. Once Breaking Bad was knocked out of the top spots by Attack on Titan and Fullmetal Alchemist weebs I stopped caring about the ratings.

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[-] Someonedifferent@sh.itjust.works 21 points 11 months ago

I miss the IMDb message boards so much. It was so neat to be able to ask a question about a movie or read a post someone made three years before explaining the ending.

[-] echoplex21@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

Letterboxd has been slowly filling that void for me

[-] nevernevermore@kbin.social 28 points 11 months ago

shitifacation

The term is enshittification, penned by Cory Doctorow

Shitifacation was my last international holiday where the airline lost my luggage

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[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 87 points 11 months ago

IGN making this article is wild. I'm not accusing them of accepting literal money but come on lmao.

[-] Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 29 points 11 months ago

IGN: “Fifty dollars?! Have some fucking dignity. Our good reviews cost at least $200k”

[-] tea@lemmy.today 15 points 11 months ago

It takes a thief to catch a thief

[-] Lazylazycat@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

Yeah didn't they give the latest Battlefield 9/10 on release? 😂

[-] Sniatch@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

I was thinking the same lol

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[+] HellAwaits@lemm.ee 58 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

[deleted]

[-] Hiccup@lemmy.dbzer0.com 26 points 11 months ago

Not really. Up until recently, most of the MCU was good to great. I'm not exactly sure where the shift happened, but a lot of the more recent ones have been trash. I'm talking about the secret invasions and black widows, where they've completely lost the script.

[-] PopOfAfrica@lemmy.world 43 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

After End Game was that shift. It felt like they told all there was to tell, and the stakes were gone. It peaked.

[-] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago

It already started slightly before Endgame - both Ant-Man and the Wasp, as well as Captain Marvel, weren't great. After Endgame though it definitely fell off completely.

Kinda like season 7 and 8 of Game of Thrones. During season 7 we still had some hope left...

[-] Cethin@lemmy.zip 7 points 11 months ago

The peak is at whatever point you realized you had seen the same movie before.

[-] ArghZombies@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

Which is why RT scores were usually good. Because a RT percentage is just the percentage of critics that thought the film was good or better.

Too many people treat RT scores as a single "this is a film that has a quality rating of 90%" whereas it's "90% of critics think it's not shit".

Really, this is RTs fault for picking a metric so often used in a different way.

[-] money_loo@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago

Yeah everyone knows if something is popular it sucks.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 9 points 11 months ago

However entertaining and fun the MCU has been at times, I'd say they've clearly gotten away with a lot when it comes to movie making. Like there are plenty of films in that franchise/cinematic-universe that just wouldn't have cut it and would have died on the scrap heap as stand alone films. But the MCU glow kept them alive and folded them into the giant stream of MCU content.

Beyond that, I'd bet that the post-endgame stuff has been done objectively badly ... like you could break it down into a number of poor movie/franchise making choices (like you can't simply build a story out of "a multiverse", it isn't a character or plot idea, you need more). Love and Thunder was an awful film. Can anyone tell which characters are part of the story and which are being written out any more? Etc etc.

It's all still popular though. Beyond that, your argument is a strawman ... the MCU can be a give away (because, IMO, it has clearly made a number of missteps) without the question of popularity v quality being an issue.

[-] Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 43 points 11 months ago

The best part - Rotten Tomatoes can be manipulated by paying several people $50. Five Hamiltons.

I know reviewing movies doesn’t pay well, but I didn’t know it was that bad.

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.one 13 points 11 months ago

How many $50 reviewers did they have to buy though?

Looking at Ophelia... huh, it's not on Rotten Tomatoes anymore...

Well, looking at ANOTHER crappy Daisy Ridley movie, Chaos Walking:

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chaos_walking

21% rating on 154 reviews.

So 32 positive reviews and 122 negative reviews.

To hit 60% they would need to add 151 positive reviews. 183/305 total reviews.

At $50 a pop, those 151 positive reviews would run $7,550. Chump change.

[-] psycho_driver@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

If you really want to get depressed research how much representatives and senators have been bought off with in the recent past.

[-] pulaskiwasright@lemmy.ml 31 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Rotten tomatoes had nothing to do with this. They don’t even employ critics. They aggregate them and the PR firm was directly contacting reviewers.

[-] downpunxx@kbin.social 18 points 11 months ago

If you think RT hasn't been in active incentive based collusion with studios and critic for years, you're the type of purposefully ignorant that advertisers make their bread and butter off of. RT was been corrupt since they sold out, and that was a very very very long time ago now.

[-] EdibleFriend@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Didn't they actively and very publicly suppresse reviews on a few movies because they called it brigading? I think one was girl Ghostbusters?

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[-] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 12 points 11 months ago

They have been playing fast and loose with who qualifies as a professional reviewer allowing for increased manipulation.

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[-] Endorkend@kbin.social 21 points 11 months ago

Who would've thought that this was happening on a site with often massive disparities between Critic and Public reviews, almost always related to content with big marketing budgets.

[-] Four_lights77@lemm.ee 21 points 11 months ago

The user reviews are where it’s at on rotten tomatoes. The critic reviews have been kinda suspect for a while.

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[-] betwixthewires@lemmy.basedcount.com 14 points 11 months ago

Good god has the world not figured this out already? Or was it a conspiracy theory until now?

[-] zcd@lemmy.ca 10 points 11 months ago

Yeah no shit, RT end IMDb have been review shills for years, completely worthless

[-] metallic_substance@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yeah, I've seen it too. Anybody got good suggestions for alternatives?

[-] artsii@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Check out Letterboxd. But the star rating system is used a bit differently than you might be used to, like an average move will get a 3/5 stars, and that’s not a “bad” score. Just took me a bit getting used to

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[-] spittingimage@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

Uncovered? I thought it was public knowledge for years.

[-] AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee 7 points 11 months ago

I always just assumed that the badly rated ones might be legit but that the higher ones may have had a few bought off critics (because capitalism) here and there, but now I know I'm right.

[-] psycho_driver@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

Anybody who hasn't noticed the change in recent years hasn't been paying attention.

[-] Naatan@lemmy.one 4 points 11 months ago

Movie / TV reviews are such a shit show. I rarely find myself agreeing with the averaged out rating.

These days I’ll just make sure the rating is above say 30 and beyond that I’ll rely on trailers and reading actual reviews. But finding new movies and tv shows to watch is quite a chore as a result.

I hope someday soon AI can be employed to give you real personalized recommendations that don’t suck. But realistically it’ll just be more shitty algorithms meant to serve the interests of the highest bidder.

[-] someguy3@lemmy.ca 6 points 11 months ago

This is why I liked rotten tomatoes, it separates the critics scores from the audience scores.

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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023

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