Rotten Tomatoes and
Sour Grapes
It’s hard to imagine a world these
days without the luxury of reviews for entertainment online. Sites like Rotten
Tomatoes and Metacritic have made it incredibly easy to look up individual reviews
and overall consensuses on movies, TV shows, games and more. Utilizing them,
it’s become easier than ever to decide whether or not a piece of entertainment
is worth a look or not.
This has, understandably,
sent the people who make money off said entertainment into a tizzy. Earlier
this month the folks over at The A.V. Club published an article called
“Hollywood is terrified of Rotten Tomatoes”. I’d highly recommend giving it a
read, but for those of you who don’t want to I’ll give a quick rundown. With
sites like Rotten Tomatoes at an all-time high, the greed-munchers running the
major movie studios aren’t exactly happy with how people can now avoid the bad
stuff they make.
A very recent comparison
we can make is between Wonder Woman and
The Mummy. On one hand, the
female-led superhero flick is raking in the cash, has earned itself thousands
of fans and has even given DC’s cinematic universe the potential to redeem
itself even after its double disappointments from 2016. Meanwhile, even Tom
Cruise couldn’t save The Mummy, which
looks to be on a fast track towards becoming one of 2017’s most notable box
office bombs, leaving plans for a shared universe between Universal’s classic
monsters like Frankenstein and Dracula up in the air.
And one of the big
reasons why this has happened is thanks to Rotten Tomatoes. Wonder Woman currently sits at a
monumental 92% fresh, one of the highest ratings a superhero movie has ever
received. Meanwhile, The Mummy has
earned itself a measly 15% fresh, and with only 43% of audiences saying they
enjoyed the movie. Which one would you rather spend valuable time and cash
going to see?
Because of this,
executives aren’t happy that bombs are becoming significantly more likely these
days. If the critics don’t like a movie, they’ll talk about it in their
reviews. If the reviews are considered Rotten, the Tomatometer for their movie
will go down. The further the Tomatometer goes down, the less people will be
interested in seeing the movie. The less people are interested in the movie, the
less money it makes for the shareholders. And at the end of the day, the
shareholders are who these companies are really trying to please.
And don’t worry, I
promise this is going to become about video games in a second, but we haven’t
even gotten to the juicy part yet!
So how do you solve this
problem? Well, the folks over at 20th Century Fox have a solution. According to
the article, Vanity Fair managed to get their hands on a study published within
the company in 2015, and some of the stuff in there isn’t exactly consumer friendly.
Let’s read my favourite part together, shall we?
“Consider not giving the critics a chance to slam you. While it’s never
a great feeling to withhold from critics, now it may help to at least preserve
your Friday.”
Ah, executives. Never
change.
Is withholding reviews
for anything a good idea? No,
absolutely not. Blocking reviews until the last minute for your product only
demonstrates little confidence in it and makes the consumer more wary than
anything else. Despite this, review embargos breaking the same day as something
is released is become scarily frequent, especially in the realm of video games.
Remember August 2016 when
Sony didn’t allow any reviews of the astronomically hyped No Man’s Sky out before the game was released? The game turned out
to not just fail to live up to the hype, but actually turned out to be a
legitimately terrible game that delivered less than 25% of what was promised in
the pre-release material, leading to one of the biggest backlashes in gaming
history.
Also infamous for
adopting this practice is Bethesda, who apparently has decided they don’t want
to be one of the few companies that still has some goodwill from fans anymore. (Don’t
worry, I’ll be giving them and their lousy Creation Club its own editorial
sooner than later) After the success of last year’s Doom, Bethesda decided they should bank their entire review policy
over the fact the embargo for that game broke the same day it launched. Since
then, games like Dishonored 2, Skyrim Special Edition and Prey have released with no reviews to
their name.
So why do companies do
this if it just creates caution? Well, not all consumers check reviews before
going to see a movie or buying a game, especially if the product is from a
series they enjoy or from a trusted developer or production company. As the old
saying goes, “no news is good news”, and if news hasn’t broke that the movie or
game isn’t worth spending time on, there will most definitely be people putting
down money on it on Day 1, only to be disappointed later on. I know that
happened to me when No Man’s Sky happened,
and I know many people who feel the same way.
The game industry can
seem unsalvageable at times with how much shady behaviour goes on behind the
scenes, and if I didn’t have such a love for the medium I think I would’ve
given up on it years ago. But if the movie industry wants to start employing
one of the dirtiest tricks game companies have up their sleeves, we’re in for a
problem.
And the funniest part
here is that there’s an easy solution for all this. Don’t want Rotten Tomatoes
stomping on your movie’s monetary returns? Just make a good movie. People loved
Wonder Woman and hated The Mummy for a reason, you slimy
executives. See if you can figure out why.
Song
of the Week
Spacejunk Galaxy – Super Mario Galaxy
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