The decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes: The most overrated metric in movies is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked — and yet has Hollywood in its grip

Rotten Tomatoes skews everything toward the mediocre. Goes back to the theme of filmmakers being afraid to take risks these days, because heaven forbid they get some sort of conflicting opinions on their work, it will cut the bottom line. It’s easier to make vanilla films with mass appeal.

A very good read, but I take something else away from it that doesn't just affect movies. I forget if I was in a discussion with people on here or on reddit about popular media and the ratings they get, but one stance I've taken in response to things like Rotten Tomatoes, which, by the way, is only one head of a giant hydra, is the age of earnest, nuanced, and critical views to give readers an informed opinion to help them make a decision, is over. Or at least buried underground, and in my opinion it's done because critics hurt media producers. They are an effective check on content producers by threatening a negative review which will drive sales away. They're needed and do a public service, but to be a good critic you need to be anonymous and need to have integrity and good character, otherwise you become a weapon for the content producer.

Whats happened is, like everything else, the counter balance of criticism has become controlled for a profit. Rather than roll the dice, or God forbid actually become masterful at your craft, it's easier to buy the ticket master, the review aggregate, and control the entire process from start to finish. The end result is trash is rated highly and the part that burns me is the viewers actively defend the trash they love and support. This lowers the bar for quality for everyone else and tells the producers they can continue churning out trash and make things of less quality and it'll continue to be bought. This has affected the movie industry and it has also affected the gaming industry but gamers are very much in denial.

This was the argument. Baldur's Gate 3 was panned by metacritic, which is touted as being better than ign and rotten tomatoes, but if all reviewers across all publications are controlled, metacritic just shows you trash, trash in, trash out, as having a 97% with mobs of fans fervorously defending that 97% for a bunch of reasons.

But let's stop to take a look at what that number says. It says everyone everywhere that metacritic touches agrees that game is either flawless or close to it. Flawless. Really? It's flawless? I haven't seen a flawless game since maybe pong, pacman, tetris, because those games are simple enough to be flawless. Everything else that's even slightly more complex has flaws by sheer nature of complexity. All programs have bugs, Baldur's Gate 3 is no different with thousands of bugs fixed every subsequent patch since release. That very fact alone shows the game was not released in a complete fashion. There's bugs ranging from benign to moderate to game breaking.

But let's say we forgive the bugs, we shouldn't, that 97% is also implying all other aspects of the game could use no improvement. The UI, controller scheme, settings, performance, combat, atmosphere, writing, score, are all near or are flawless.

That's simply not true. It's a good game but simply not true. The UI and inventory is acknowledged as being a mess yet it got a 97%. The writing has been both amazing and silly or clunky at times, and it holds a near flawless score.

But gamers are the ones that defend the number. The studio gets to sit back and collect the good PR.

Another game that was buggy, performed poorly, and was memed was The Witcher 3. The zealous fanbase themselves got memed for how often they'd talk about the game as if it was life changing and flawless. Only now can a nuanced opinion be given about the game without fans suddenly appearing to defend it.

Like the directors the article has mentioned, I've stopped reading reviews for movies and carefully read headlines for games only looking for keywords on performance and stability. Anything else is corrupt and only serves to get in my pocket.

Quality took a nose dive and people celebrate it. That's what I take issue with.

In movies it's especially bad with the Hollywood machine churning out math approved formulaic movies that are guaranteed to get a certain ROI. Which is insane. They've made a formula for art to a certain level of accuracy that guarantees sales and likes. Insane.

Triple A game developers are attempting the same thing to some degree of success with resistance from gamers and some review publications but they're making headway as quality has gone down, games arrive in a broken fashion, and gamers defend it. Eg. Anything Bethesda makes.

We can shift over to books and see the same thing. Books are bought and sold on the New York Time's best seller and the Oprah Reading List and how books get on there range for all sorts of reasons but seldom is it because of the art of writing. Often times it's because of the message or politics.

Lastly, because I'm still on one, it's clear that because we're having conversations on ratings that consumers still need them! They want to avoid garbage so bad they seek reviews to help them but due to the corrupt nature of the review system, they get fed garbage anyway and then like it.

Something in the article stuck with me and that's the line about the adventurous consumer. No such thing. We're all coddled and comfortable and don't want to be disturbed or negatively surprised. So instead of taking a chance on a movie to decide for ourselves, we'll blindly trust rotten tomatoes to steer us into profit and away from thought provoking movies.

I haven't read the article, but is there a more well-regarded movie review site?

The author seems to miss a critical point: why is rotten tomatoes so popular with consumers? There's no shortage of review aggregators.