DISTRIBUTION - Critical Kudos

POSSIBLE POINTS OF INFLUENCE:

• The main victims are big tentpole productions, it is less of a danger for indie productions, and rave reviews has shown to often not lead to financial success as can be seen with multiple Warp films, the prime example being Tyrannosaur. This can be seen in the attitude of an independent film distributor below.

This an a consequence of disruption, and the convergence between audience and producers becoming more blurred, as Rotten Tomatoes consists of both reviews by critics and users.

I myself experienced how a whole group of teenagers I was spending a week with were looking forward to Suicide Squad, and how the Rotten Tomatoes review turned them off from watching it, including a hardcore Batman fan.

The power of Rotten Tomatoes:

Launched on a lark in 1998 by Web designer Senh Duong to catalogue reviews for Jackie Chan kung-fu flicks, Rotten Tomatoes has come to dominate the cultural conversation surrounding new movies and fundamentally change the calculus of putting butts in seats. It’s particularly, terrifyingly powerful among teens and 20-somethings who, as recently as five years ago, relied more often than not on “Bro, you gotta see this”-style word of mouth than any sort of professional critic appraisals to make their multiplex picks.
“Moviegoers love trailers. They pay attention to the TV spots. But Rotten Tomatoes is like the truth serum on the entire [promotional] campaign: are all the things you’re telling me about the movie true or not?” says Jon Penn, chief executive of the movie research firm National Research Group (NRG), which has tracked Rotten Tomatoes’ influence on audience behavior since 2010. “These scores are almost like a lubricant one way or the other. If it’s good, it helps you more than it did in the past. But if it’s bad, it hurts you even more.”

A negative review doesn't always mean a film becomes a flop.

There are, to be sure, plenty of movies that become runaway hits despite craptacular Rotten Tomatoes scores—the Twilight and Transformers franchises, Tyler Perry’sMadea series, and the latest two entries in the nascent DC Extended Universe (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad) before Wonder Woman. But the larger pattern shows that the correlation between Rotten Tomatoes scores and audience interest has become remarkably consistent.
According to the stats compiled by NRG, almost every major moviegoing demographic reports an increasing reliance on Rotten Tomatoes. “One of the things we track is, ‘How often do you check Rotten Tomatoes scores before you decide to see a film?’” Penn says. “In 2014, 28 percent of all moviegoers said they were checking. In 2016, it’s 36 percent. Teens went from 23 [percent] to 34. That’s an enormous jump.” 

 The studios preparing to fight back:

And the studios are only preparing for it to get worse. An independent study commissioned by 20th Century Fox in 2015 (and obtained by Vanity Fair), titled “Rotten Tomatoes and Box Office,” concluded, “The power of Rotten Tomatoes and fast-breaking word of mouth will only get stronger. Many Millennials and even Gen Xers now vet every single purchase through the internet, whether it’s restaurants, video games, make-up, consumer electronics, or movies. As they get older and comprise an even larger share of total moviegoers, this behavior is unlikely to change.”
The power of the review aggregator has infuriated heavy hitters like Brett Ratner,who—in an apparent fit of pique after his recent producing effort Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice earned an eye-watering 27 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes—called it “the worst thing that we have in today’s movie culture.”

An independent marketing executive states that the reason is that less attention and financial resources are being paid to the quality of the film, the primary focus is on the marketing. This shows the mentality behind Warp Films, they want to be convinced that the film they have to marketed is high in quality, instead of just convincing the audience of the quality with the quality as a secondary priority. 

The most obvious recourse to Hollywood’s Rotten Tomatoes conundrum, of course, may also be the simplest (at least on paper): prioritize filmmaking quality over marketing artifice, make better/more interesting/more appealing films, and stop blaming some stupid website for lackluster box-office returns.
“To me, it’s a ridiculous argument that Rotten Tomatoes is the problem,” says a marketing executive at an independent film distributor. “F*** you—make a good movie!”

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