PR Firm Has Been Paying Rotten Tomatoes Critics For Positive Reviews
PR Firm Has Been Paying Rotten Tomatoes Critics For Positive Reviews
A new report says that a PR firm has been paying Rotten Tomatoes critics for positive reviews for over five years.
Let me know if you ever find an entertainment review medium that isn't actually comprimised ok. If you do, I bet it's crowdsourced, not made by a company.
61RedLetterMedia
20RedLetterMedia
Clearly in the pockets of Big Pizza Roll.
31Red Letter Media is like working class Roger and Ebert. When they discuss things they do a great job of clarifying their personal preferences separate from their criticisms.
18Or YMS
2I would agree with you to until I saw the cobweb review last night. That movie is absolutely garbage, I think they are getting some kind of kick back
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Crowdsourced won't work either since the crowd is compromised.
It costs pennies a review to get a bot army going.
4If you want a real answer find a YouTuber with a moderate following that you enjoy and listen to them.
There are plenty of them that are genuinely fun to watch but not big enough that studios try to influence them. They are also all Canadian for some reason.
3
Would this be illegal under “payola” laws?
26Who has ever taken RT as a legitimate critiques site? I mean; half the movies they say suck, are in fact amazing, and their high rated ones, are just Hollywood garbage with some A list names...
21Rotten Tomatoes doesn't rate movies, they aggregate scores based on favorable/unfavorable reviews. All movie ratings are unreliable unless you are familiar with the reviewer or read their explanations.
I love the separate RT critic and audience scores. For something like Cocaine Bear I only care about the audience rating, while more serious movies I check out both.
28I second this. Here in Sweden we used to have a movie site where they applied some magic to the calculation and presented how you would rate a movie on a scale 1-5 and they were always correct within ±1 point. So fx a 3 could be either 2, 3 or 4 etc etc. While the site still exists it has seen better days so RT had been my go-to site for movie scores and reviews.
2The new Mario movie comes to mind for me. I don't normally watch movies, but I agree with the 95% audience score even though critics hated it. Everybody else I know who saw the movie liked it too.
2
I went there once to check for opinions on the 2016 Deadpool movie.
Then I saw a negative review of some angry dough ball crying about why Deadpool was feminist propaganda.
I left that site and never looked back.
5
It happened to the Better Business Bureau, Yelp, Google Reviews, Amazon Reviews. If you google random products + reviews, you'll get limitless "review websites" with the product you are looking at, with lots of suspicious "affiliate" links.
All reviews on the internet are BS. In the past, Consumer Reports was seen as legitimate, it's the only one who might be legit now.
19Not all reviews are BS--all review sites are BS. Plenty of real people post real reviews mixed in with the fake ones.
10That's fair. The signal-to-noise ratio makes it hard to determine truth.
7
My old job bought reviews. We had apps with millions of downloads, and at least half of the reviews were purchased. We've had thousands of five star reviews to our brick and mortar stores, all paid for to boost our presence.
Whenever we launch a new thing, we'd have hundreds of reviews ready. Kinda like leaving a few dollars in a tip jar to get the energy going.
Welcome to modern day business practice.
7The Better Business Bureau was always a protection racket. Businesses pay (a lot) for membership. If you aren't a member you can't respond to complaints and it impacts your business negatively. Members can respond to a complaint and no matter what the response is, or if the customer is satisfied, the complaint gets marked as resolved.
2Temu is pretty blatant about buying reviews on play store as well as it's own.
1
Life Hacker is going to add this to their upcoming “Christmas gifts for under $50” blog post
12Looking at both critic and audience reviews scores on these sites is often a good indicator.
If there's a large disparity between the two, someone made some money (and interestingly, it happens most often with AAA games ...).
9Depends. This was more often done for indie movies. The audience score can be prone to brigading.
8
Hey remember a few years ago when people were talking about film critics being bribed by Disney?
7you don't say
5Explains why critics will rate movies a 10 and users a 4
5I'm the only rating site I care about. Everything else is compromised.
5I wish future me could let me know a movie sucked before hand.
7It's pretty easy to tell if you look at the director, writer, and studio if it will suck.
5
I thought this was already known
1iirc something came out a few years back about this. That's when I stopped going to RT for any info.
1
Well, it is a PR firm. Sounds like they were just doing their job.
-5