RT Audience Score Rigged Again

People defending TLJ: Look at that high critical score.

The same people defending Solo: The critical score doesn't matter.

 

The fact is the fans hated the Last Jedi. AT least half of them. Heck a good amount of my high school kids didn't like it. None of my friends who all saw the OT in the theater liked it either. The score wasn't rigged.

Critics supposedly liked TLJ but they aren't fans of the series. Not like we are. And some of them had to be worried that if they reviewed it honestly they'd get Disney pissed off at them (I know I'd be worried about pissing off Disney if I were a film critic).

For me, as a fan, Solo was a better film than TLJ. Sad to say. I think had I seen Solo after Rogue One I might be disappointed in it, but since it came out after TLJ it suddenly looks much better.

 

I know 2 people who liked the movie and they can barely remember having see ep VII or name three characters of the movie.

 

I don't put too much stock in RT scores but I did feel the user scores for TLJ had been targeted by some of those particualrly enraged/disappointed fans. It's a tricky thing to solve... in the end it just undermines the whole concept of user ratings, even though I can't help but be reminded of that episode of Blackadder ...

I can't say I like the whole 'proving you saw the film' before you can vote thing either. Oh well.

 

@DailyPlunge How about an entire society based upon "Up or Down" voting.....The Orville episode "Majority Rule" was both hilarious and also sobering at the same time....

 

That's all cool, but I don't understand why they don't correct the score if they know it to be in error.

Having data displayed that is knowingly errant is incredibly embarrassing, useless, and causes anyone who knows of it to doubt any given other data since there's not even a marker indicating affected metrics.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Seems easy enough to at least remove any pre-release data, and any suspect data (since they claim moderators can identify it), or yes - just wipe it.

Yeah; I know. I honestly never gave a damn what audience reviews said...well...anywhere.
Actually. Not true. Often, if audience reviews were cranked to favor, I'd question liking it. Cranked to hating it, I'd go check it out (and like it) because history of personal experience taught me that, for me, this seems to be the case often.

Still...RT has always been really low on my list.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

That happened with me as well. I was a huge Star Wars nut in my childhood and teenage years. After Revenge of the Sith, there were no new movies for a long time, and that's when I started to lose interest. I was never not a fan, necessarily, but there were certainly several years when I didn't think about Star Wars as much. Even when Force Awakens was coming up, I began to get burnt out with all the hype. But then I saw the movie and thought it was great, and suddenly it was a more exciting time to be a fan than it'd ever been. It was also what inspired me to go check out the TV shows. When I was watching The Clone Wars and Rebels, I was like, "These are great; how did I miss this before?"


Anyway, as for the review-bombing, that is unfortunate. But at the same time, it doesn't bother me too much in the sense that I've always been one of those "forget the critics" guys who tends to avoid reviews/ratings/etc. before going to see a movie simply because I like to form my own opinion. I'll often check out the ratings after the fact, but more out of a general curiosity.

It would be interesting if we could see what the Last Jedi RT audience rating would've been without the review-bombing. I suspect the rating would still be somewhat lower, but 44% seems a bit too disproportinately low considering that IMDb has a much more favourable 7.1. What's also interesting is that Star Wars Resistance is the opposite; it has a rather low IMDb rating, but a more positive RT audience rating.

 

RT has now adjusted the Audience 4 times all because of films that have potential to be socially divisive. It is a a by product of our current society.
RT changed after TLJ because it was review bombed.
RT changed before Black Panther because they feared more review bombing.
RT changed before Captain Marvel because they feared more review bombing and they deleted 1000s upon 1000s of review, nearly all negative, that were made before the movie released.
RT changed before Aladdin because the feared review bombing and this time made proof of ticket a requirement.

Notice anything in common about the films that caused the changes? I will give a couple hints. All of these films have been attacked by people/groups that dont like movies that either have diverse casts or a core part of the audience would be diverse.

 

What is this obsession that the Rotten Tomatoes scores are supposed to determine how good or bad a movie is? Movies are subjective, like other forms of art and entertainment. Rotten Tomatoes can change the site scores until the cows come home. I regard the website and the opinions of film critics in general as irrelevant.

 

The origin of this, at least around here, goes back to the finance thread, and a few other TLJ performance based threads.
After the financial argument that the film failed to perform well, and was therefore a bad film, foundered by examining Disney's financial quarterly reports (which contained their financial opinion, and 10 years of reports showed how that they do state when something does less than desired - because it's illegal not to tell shareholders), the RT scores were cited as evidence that the film wasn't actually liked, regardless how well it did financially.

The RT scores were then brought into focus, and eventually shown to be quite suspect by comparison to other online ratings platforms; each examined in detail for methods and results.
Also included was the Cinemascore method.

This thread branched out to dive more into the matter, and was related to the finance thread quite closely for a while.

After the RT scores were questioned, the position essentially became that TLJ, while financially successful, failed to do as well as it should have, and several methods of comparing it to other films occurred. This was then cited as the evidence that it was a bad movie nearly objectively.
Counter comparisons were given, with typical trends in films in various monetary and rating methods, and it was shown that there was a consistent lack of finite goal in the idea of TLJ being a financial success, but not performing well enough.
This last point more or less is where things puttered around to. After this, it more became less active and repetitive conversations.

During that period, the point was made about RT's TLJ bombing, and the only counter in support for the RT score being low (and therefore real, and therefore TLJ being objectively bad in reception) was that RT wasn't saying that the score was being bombed.

Ergo, the recent revival and posting here updating that the RT position is at this point that the TLJ value is artificially caused, which closes the only loose thread that was left.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Rotten Tomatoes scores and box office numbers do not influence if I like a movie, or even if I go see a movie, because many of my favorite movies are poorly reviewed box office bombs, and likewise some of the better performing movies are ones I do not care for. It's sort of like a sports fan following scores and statistics. You are still a fan of certain teams and players despite the numbers. You keep track, but who you're a fan of isn't solely determined by ratings and rankings. You like what you like. That isn't a perfect analogy, but the best I can come up with. It's all just very interesting to me.

 

Yeah, I never check reviews to pick a movie.
I go the other way. I avoid everything including trailers.

I don't think anyone in the conversation uses such things to pick movies to watch.

It came up as a way to gauge the success of the film, which was being examined because it was being posited that TLJ was a bad film and that this could be seen nearly objectively by review ratings and its financial success; or rather "underperformance".

Basically, it was, more or less, "I didn't like this film. It's a bad film. Here's evidence to support the idea that it's a bad film."

No one really cared if someone specifically didn't like the film or did. There was just a tangent that got caried away trying to show some objective narrative as to how TLJ was terrible as evidenced by finacial returns and review ratings.

In the end, however, the take away was that TLJ did just fine on both fronts and there were a sizable number of fans who strongly disliked the film.

In other words, the two are not mutually exclusive properties and can, and did, coexist.

To my knowledge, however, no one involved in the discussion showed any habit of relying on ratings to determine if they would watch the film, nor whether they should like it or not.
It was just an attempt to show a public opinion, but it didn't hold well for multiple reasons; chief of which was the RT method which doesn't come close to standards of population sampling - unlike something like Cinemascore.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

While that might be true. Of all the people that didn't like these movies, the group you're calling out is probably still the minority. Bringing up this argument tends to make
people who are emotional about not liking a movie they feel they should like (because e.g. it is Star Wars), feel insulted, because it feels like you're saying they are part of that group, but they aren't. We've been at that point way to often here.
So here my statement, even if there is a minority group of sexist, bigot, racists that don't like the movie. Not liking the movie doesn't make you one.
Even if you don't like the character of Rey, Finn, Rose, C3PO...
And everybody else can we stay far far away from implying that people who don't like TLJ are having that mindset.

That is something I would like to see.

 

Understand the sentiment, but were not talking about those people. We are talking about people that want to tell others that TLJ or some other film sucked because look at the RT audience score. All we are saying it you cant use a score that was so easily manipulated and in the day and age when we have actors (not movie actors) that dont give a rats ass about a film who are using internet based assets like social media to create social discord throughout society to not play their games.

 

I don't think it was an implied finger at SW fans.
The unfortunate fact of our current cultural zeitgeist is that it does include a resurgence of bigotry once reserved for history class of the clashes of the 60's.
True, they are smaller now by far than then, but if I had to imagine where we would be in 2020 when I was watching TNG, Reading Rainbow, Murder She Wrote, and definately basically everything from 1989 to 1992, I would not imagine this current flare as part of it.

People do talk of minorities being shoe-horned into modern media with spite, and while it wasn't exactly fans who targeted these films, they were targeted because that is unfortunately where we're at - still retaining this once-thought all-but-dead overt and entitled bigotry.

So would I.
However, I gave it a swing and my current computer isn't up to the task, so it's on hold.

Cheers,
Jayson