Who murdered Transformers: The Last Knight? The fifth movie in the series opened last weekend to numbers that weren't simply lower than expected—they amounted to the worst opening weekend haul of the entire franchise. Apparently, four visually nonsensical films about giant robots hitting each other had been plenty for moviegoers. This being a blame-loving industry, though, the search began for exactly who was responsible for this Floptimus Prime.
Don’t blame the actors; the fault lies not within the stars. Maybe blame director Michael Bay—or Akiva Goldsman, who assembled a writer's room in order to churn out more Transformers movies for Paramount and Hasbro. Or, hey, blame Paramount itself, who maybe should not have tried to squeeze more than meets the eye out of its only repeating cash crop besides Mission: Impossible.
Maybe it was data. After a spate of movies that failed to live up to commercial and critical expectations this summer, Hollywood’s evangelists have become increasingly likely to blame aggregated-scorekeepers like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic for harshing their buzz. Baywatch, The Mummy, Pirates of the Carribbean: Yarrrr Kidding, Right?—all of them perished, caught between the green-splatted Scylla of the Tomatometer and the sulfurous Charybdis of not-very-goodness.
“I want every movie to be good. I absolutely do. I hope every movie I sit down and see is good,” says Matt Atchity, editor in chief at Rotten Tomatoes. “Do I want to see people fail? No. I don’t want to see anybody fail.”
Yet fail they do. And that might be because of Rotten Tomatoes.
Founded in 1998, Rotten Tomatoes has had a series of corporate owners, most recently the online movie ticket site Fandango, itself jointly owned by Warner Brothers and Comcast (which also owns NBCUniversal). The simple concept: Turn hundreds of movie reviews into binary pass/fail assessments—inspired by the thumbs up-or-down of the critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert—into a quantified selfie that captures a movie’s overall quality. You get a “fresh” or a “rotten.” If the site slurps up 100 reviews for a given movie and 10 are negative, that's a 90 percent score.
The site maintains fairly straightforward rules about which reviewers and outlets it’ll draw from—about 2,000 critics overall contribute, though no movie has reviews from all of them. Some critics have adapted to the binary distinction, sending along word as to how Rotten Tomatoes should code their possibly more subtle review. “Some days a 2.5 out of 5 out of a particular critic might be fresh, and with a different movie might be a rotten, and that’s OK with us,” Atchity says.
Metacritic, founded the year after Rotten Tomatoes, grades more finely—and, perhaps as a result, is less influential. The site also aggregates scores for computer games, and converts critics’ scores from 58 publications to a 100-point scale. A 3 out of 5 is a 60 on Metacritic; 7.2 on Paste is 72. They hand-code New York Times reviews. Movies need at least four reviews to get a metascore.
Unlike Rotten Tomatoes, though, Metacritic weights some reviewers to have a greater influence on the score. “That’s our little secret formula. I’ll just leave it at that,” says Keith Kimbell, Metacritic’s film editor. “It’s something that we keep to ourselves to keep our formula unique compared to just a straight average.”
That all sounds reasonable—innocuous, even. But Rotten Tomatoes scores now show up not only on the site, but also in reviews and articles about the movies they purport to assess, and next to ticket purchase options on Fandango. In advance of Wonder Woman, the movie's very high score itself became a story.
Those stories spread, and the score has an impact—especially with younger audiences. “As soon as a Rotten Tomatoes score is published, the volume of conversation coming from teens will drop by 70 percent,” says Ben Carlson, co-founder of social media research firm Fizziology. “Fewer people are just driving to the theater at 8 PM on a Friday and figuring out what to see when they get there. They’re having to buy their tickets and select their seats early, and those scores are presented at the time of decisions.”
In the last two years, Rotten Tomatoes’ importance has only grown. “Bad RT scores cause greater changes in audience opinion than good RT scores,” Carlson says. “If you have a score under 30, it has a 300 percent greater impact in the volume of review conversations than scores over 70.” Compounding the impact is the fact that scores come out in advance of the actual movie, when the review embargoes break. That might be as late as the morning of a movie's release, but it's more likely even earlier.
Rotten Tomatoes separately tracks audience opinion, too. That's good, right? Gives the moviegoer a chance to fight back against the tyranny of fancy-pants critics with their stupid snotty arthouse palates. After all, even for the surprise flops I mentioned earlier like Baywatch, the audience rated those higher than critics. Except: twist! Recently, those audience numbers have begun to change as soon as the Tomatometer score goes live—in other words, before anyone has seen the movie.
The difference between the critics' scores and the audience scores is what breaks studio executives’ hearts. Obviously, a bad Tomatometer sends their opening weekend box office up in flames, but a dwindling audience score also denies them a chance at a potential long tail. Baywatch started out low on critics' reviews, but high on audience opinion—and then...alas. “There are audiences that would have given a movie a chance and maybe liked it or loved it that are now staying away. The same way that Rotten Tomatoes tends to be a pass/fail, with not many movies in the middle, that may be the trend we see from the box office,” Carlson says. “There’s a kind of draining of the middle class, because audiences aren’t giving those movies a chance they would have.”
That’s especially damaging, because studios were already moving away from that so-called middle class of film, the ones with smaller budgets and original (read: non-adapted) concepts, the ones that aren't the kind of mass-market franchises that Rotten Tomatoes tends to score the highest. Worse, the binary yes/no assessment can spell doom for movies with niche appeal: stories that appeal to hardcore horror fans, say, or to moviegoing communities—black, Middle Eastern, queer, you name it—otherwise underrepresented on the big screen. And aggregation already disadvantages those movies, since the critic pool itself has diversity issues. A June 2016 study said that just 27 percent of Rotten Tomatoes' "top critics" are women, for example.
Niche movies' doom isn't necessarily predestined. Get Out, Moonlight, and La La Land—all mid- or low-budget, none exactly a summer tentpole—all benefitted from high scores. Tyler Perry movies and the 50 Shades franchise seem immune to the depredations of criticism. But (showing my age here) how would The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai have done? Or Blade Runner? Or any of the 1980s slasher movies now regarded as classic horror? Critics weren’t so into those movies, but reading the reviews, rather than the score distilled from multiple reviews, at least let audiences judge for themselves whether they trusted the critic's take.
Don’t cry too hard for the studio suits—they’re the ones who decided to start putting Rotten Tomatoes scores in their 30-second TV spots. If you tout a 96, you gotta live with a 60. Vanity Fair reported that an internal study at 20th Century Fox warned of Millennials’ increasing reliance on Rotten Tomatoes scores. The Hollywood Reporter says a Paramount study showed the same. The executives knew it was coming.
The people speaking for studios say that Rotten Tomatoes' danger is not that it's data, but that it looks like data. Which is to say, it quantifies the unquantifiable. And they have a point. In a perfect world, film critics would write about movies, walk through their philosophical implications and stylistic aspirations, and have something to say about the people who made them and the people who might want to see them. Maybe you could put a number on that—but Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t.
Rotten Tomatoes does allow users to click through to individual reviews, and its staff writes reviews themselves. But those aren't the site's primary use case. “For a casual user that just wants a very broad scope, if I was one of those people, the percentage would work well,” Atchity says. “On a certain level it is in our best interest to send as much traffic as possible to individual reviews, because without the critics being incentivized by the platforms that employ them, RT is less useful.”
No one sets out to make a bad movie. And studios might still be able to outwit the dominance and ubiquity of Rotten Tomatoes. They’ve started to launch pre-emptive strikes. Leaking high internal tracking scores as happened with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, can gin up pre-review, pre-Tomatometer-score enthusiasm. Or studios could start refraining from screening their movies for critics altogether, as Vanity Fair reported the Fox study proposed. That used to be code for "we know this movie sucks." Now it might just be prudent.
For studios not named Disney, fighting back might mean diversifying away from international blockbusters about people who wear capes—like, for example, Universal cutting deals with Blumhouse for interesting horror, Illumination for global animation, and 50 Shades for sex. Corporate cultures may have to change, too. Disney famously manages its filmmaking processes, hard. Warner Brothers famously gives its directors lots of space—good move when they’re Christopher Nolan or Patty Jenkins, maybe less so with some others. Both approaches yield specific kinds of movies, but it’s the former that seems to find favor with Rotten Tomatoes.
For all the handwringing, some of the movies that score the worst and flop the hardest in the US find massive success overseas, especially in China. Audiences there are more tuned to big, effects-driven action and likely don’t have the high-quality, end-stage-Capitalism home entertainment experience common in America that makes six episodes of Glow a plausible alternative to a night at the movies. But eventually every overseas territory is going to have a score aggregator just like Rotten Tomatoes. And then? The curse of the pseudo-data will rise to kill again.
