The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes
www.vulture.com
The most overrated metric in entertainment is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked — and yet has Hollywood in its grip.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23769430

All of this would be one thing if Rotten Tomatoes were merely an innocent relic from Web 1.0 being preyed upon by Hollywood sharks. But the site has come a long way from its founding, in 1998, by UC Berkeley grads, one of whom wanted a place to catalogue reviews of Jackie Chan movies. Rotten Tomatoes outlasted the dot-com bubble and was passed from one buyer to another, most recently in 2016. That year, Warner Bros. sold most of it to Fandango, which shares a parent company with Universal Pictures. If it sounds like a conflict of interest for a movie-review aggregator to be owned by two companies that make movies and another that sells tickets to them, it probably is.

If you found this of interest, check out the related article: Online Reviews Are Being Bought and Paid For. Get Used to It

Archive link: https://archive.ph/lyddW

  • adr1anEnglish
    5•1 month ago

    IMDb is biased towards production of their owners (Amazon). I prefer tmdb.org

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝OPMEnglish
      1•1 month ago

      I’ve not noticed any great bias myself and don’t really let the rating impact my decisions. However, if I am going to move off IMDb (and I have gone all in there) then it’s likely to be to a federated service.