Tomato, Tomato! PR Firm has been manipuplating Rotten Tomatoes scores for years

[sandstorm]

A PR firm has been manipulating the Rotten Tomato scores of movies for at least five years by paying some “critics” directly. Truly depressing stuff here by @LaneBrown https://t.co/s0gwMJCfVy
- Mike Ryan (@mikeryan) September 6, 2023

• PR Firm Bunker 15 pays obscure, self published critics who are still somehow tracked by RT to be positive about movies that are just as obscure.
• It mentions the 2018 Daisy Ridley film "Ophelia", which I'm sure was still waiting to be released in 2023.
• So TIL this movie came out.
• The Bunker 15 employee said yeah, we can write what we want, but the bad reviews are put on small blogs RT doesn't see.

"Between October 2018 and January 2019, Rotten Tomatoes added eight reviews to Ophelia’s score. Seven were favorable, and most came from critics who have reviewed at least one other Bunker 15 movie." -- If someone wanted to change their review, the Bunker 15 employees knew a RT editor.

Of course, the RT scoring calculation is just # of positive reviews / # of total reviews. The rest of the article talks about how no one really gives a fuck about critic views or reviews anymore apparently. They look at a number and go "Maybe it's worth the rental fee".

"Ringer found that Tomatometer scores do correlate with box-office returns, especially for comedies and horror films, but the authors admit that the pandemic may have scrambled moviegoing habits in ways that data may not fully account for yet." -- Those are the most subjective tastes to moviegoers, so I can see why that would be

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