LOS
ANGELES — Hollywood had a horrible summer.
Between the first
weekend in May and Labor Day, a sequel-stuffed period that typically
accounts for 40 percent of annual ticket sales, box office revenue in
North America totaled $3.8 billion, a 15 percent decline from the
same span last year. To find a slower summer, you would have to go
back 20 years. Business has been so bad that America’s three
biggest theater chains have lost roughly $4 billion in market value
since May.
Ready for the truly
alarming part? Hollywood is blaming a website: Rotten Tomatoes.
“I
think it’s the destruction of our business,” Brett Ratner, the
director, producer and film financier, said at a film festival this
year.
Some studio
executives privately concede that a few recent movies — just a few
— were simply bad. Flawed marketing may have played a role in a
couple of other instances, they acknowledged, along with competition
from Netflix and Amazon.
But most studio
fingers point toward Rotten Tomatoes, which boils down hundreds of
reviews to give films “fresh” or “rotten” scores on its
Tomatometer. The site has surged in popularity, attracting 13.6
million unique visitors in May, a 32 percent increase above last
year’s total for the month, according to the analytics firm
comScore.
Studio
executives’ complaints about Rotten Tomatoes include the way its
Tomatometer
hacks
off critical nuance, the site’s seemingly loose definition of who
qualifies as a critic
and
the spread of Tomatometer scores across the web. Last year, scores
started appearing on Fandango, the online movie ticket-selling site,
leading to grousing that a rotten score next to the purchase button
was the same as posting this message: You are an idiot if you pay to
see this movie.
Mr. Ratner’s
sentiment was echoed almost daily in studio dining rooms all summer,
although not for attribution, for fear of giving Rotten Tomatoes more
credibility. Over lunch last month, the chief executive of a major
movie company looked me in the eye and declared flatly that his
mission was to destroy the review-aggregation site.
Kersplat:
Paramount’s “Baywatch” bombed after arriving to a Tomatometer
score of 19, the percentage of reviews the movie received that the
site considered positive (36 out of 191). Doug Creutz, a media
analyst at Cowen and Company, wrote of the film in a research note,
“Our high expectations appear to have been crushed by a 19 Rotten
Tomatoes score.”
Kersplat:
“King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” got a Tomatometer score of 28
— anything under 60 is marked rotten — and audiences stayed
away.
After costing Warner Bros. at least $175 million to make, the movie
took in $39 million at the domestic box office. In total.
How did a clunky
website that has been around for 19 years amass such power?
The 36 people who
work for Rotten Tomatoes hardly seem like industry killers. The
site’s staff occupies a relatively ordinary Beverly Hills office
complex — albeit one with conference rooms named “La La Land”
and “Oz” — and includes people like Jeff Voris, an easygoing
former Disney executive with graying hair who oversees operations,
and Timothy Ryan, a former newspaper reporter who is a Rotten
Tomatoes senior editor and lists “Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide”
as favorite reading.
The employee with
the pink mohawk is Grae Drake, senior movie editor. She does a lot of
video interviews and lately has been helping to fill a void created
when Matt Atchity left as editor in chief in July for a bigger job at
TYT Network, an online video company.
Jeff Giles, a
12-year Rotten Tomatoes veteran and the author of books like
“Llanview in the Afternoon: An Oral History of ‘One Life to
Live’,” writes what the site calls Critics Consensus, a
one-sentence summary of the response to each film. (Disney’s latest
“Pirates of the Caribbean” movie was summarized as proving “that
neither a change in directors nor an undead Javier Bardem is enough
to drain this sinking franchise’s murky bilge.”)
“Everyone
here sweats the details every day,” said Paul Yanover, the
president of Fandango, which owns Rotten Tomatoes. “Because we are
serious movie fans ourselves, our priority — our entire focus —
is being as useful to fans as we absolutely can be.”
Hold on a minute.
Fandango?
Yes.
In an absurdist plot twist, Rotten Tomatoes is owned by film
companies. Fandango, a unit of NBCUniversal, which also owns
Universal Pictures, has a 75 percent stake, with the balance held by
Warner Bros. Fandango bought
control from
Warner last year for an undisclosed price. (All parties insist that
Rotten Tomatoes operates independently.)
Mr. Yanover said it
was silly for studios to make Rotten Tomatoes a box office scapegoat.
“There
is no question that there is some correlation to box office
performance — critics matter — but I don’t think Rotten
Tomatoes can definitively make or break a movie in either direction,”
he said. “Anyone who says otherwise is cherry-picking examples to
create a hypothesis.”
He cited “Wonder
Woman,” which was the No. 1 movie of the summer, with $410 million
in ticket sales. It was undoubtedly helped by a strong Tomatometer
score of 92. “Dunkirk,” “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and
“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” all received high scores and
drew huge crowds. Other films did not do well on the Tomatometer
(“The Hitman’s Bodyguard,” “The Emoji Movie”) but still
managed to find audiences.
Some filmmakers
complain bitterly that Rotten Tomatoes casts too wide a critical net.
The site says it works with some 3,000 critics worldwide, including
bloggers and YouTube-based pundits. But should reviewers from Screen
Junkies and Punch Drunk Critics really be treated as the equals of
those from The Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker?
Mr.
Yanover rejected those complaints, pointing to the site’s posted
requirements.
(“Online critics must have published no less than 100 reviews
across two calendar years at a single, Tomatometer-approved
publication,” for instance.) He also noted that critics at
traditional outlets tended to be white men and that Rotten Tomatoes
wanted to include female and minority voices.
‘Incredibly
Layered’ Process
For the studios,
the question of how individual reviews get classified as fresh or
rotten is also a point of contention. Only about half of critics
self-submit reviews and classifications to the site. Rotten Tomatoes
staffers comb the web and pull the other half themselves. They then
assign positive or negative grades.
“We
have a well-defined process,” said Mr. Voris, the vice president of
Rotten Tomatoes. “Our curators audit each other’s work. If there
is any question about how a review should be classified, we have
three curators separate and do independent reads. If there still
isn’t agreement, we call the journalist.”
Staff members also
fact-check what critics have self-submitted. In one recent instance,
a review of “Alien: Covenant” that was submitted as fresh seemed
rotten. The site reversed the categorization after contacting the
critic for clarification.
