Editorial: Rotten Tomatoes and Sour Grapes

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