<story><title>Is Rotten Tomatoes Killing the Movie Industry? No, Bad Movies Are</title><url>http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/movies/rotten-tomatoes-tom-cruise-baywatch-brett-ratner-new-york-times-20170922.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slg</author><text>These type of articles never explore the potential results of the Rotten Tomatoes voting system.  As the article mentions the RT rating is not a measure of how good a movie is, it is a measure of the percentage of people who viewed the movie positively.  A 100% doesn&amp;#x27;t mean a movie is perfect or even particularly good, it means no one thought it was bad.&lt;p&gt;A movie designed to do well on a RT score needs to please everyone.  The end result is something that tries to be bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive.  As an avid movie goer, that is a horrible result.  I would much rather see a movie that takes risks and fails than something with little ambition outside turning a profit.&lt;p&gt;If you ask people why they don&amp;#x27;t go to the movies more they will often cite the idea that there is nothing new they haven&amp;#x27;t seen before (besides the complaints you hear about prices).  That is another way of phrasing this exact problem.  It is becoming more and more risky to innovate and try something new.  You end up with lots of sequels, remakes, and other cookie cutter projects.  It is safer to invest in the next mediocre superhero movie that most people will be fine with than an innovative middle budget drama that might have a harder time finding an audience.  That is what is hurting the movie industry.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paganel</author><text>&amp;gt; A movie designed to do well on a RT score needs to please everyone. The end result is something that tries to be bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive. As an avid movie goer, that is a horrible result. I would much rather see a movie that takes risks and fails than something with little ambition outside turning a profit.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve just finished watching for the second time a non-bland and pretty-offensive (at least for today&amp;#x27;s sensibilities) 1997 comedy starring Jamie Foxx and Vivica Fox, among others. It&amp;#x27;s called &amp;quot;Booty Call&amp;quot;. It has a 5.3 rating on IMDB (which is comparatively speaking pretty low) and only 25% on RT (which I guess is even lower). It doesn&amp;#x27;t matter, because this movie has made me laugh so hard that I literally had tears in the corners of my eyes and my stomach-muscles were beginning to hurt because of all the laughing. And remember, this was the second time when I was watching it, but I was still laughing my a.s off.&lt;p&gt;Now, I thought that maybe I&amp;#x27;m the crazy one out, a stupid viewer who doesn&amp;#x27;t understand interesting and thought-provoking movies and who only laughs at &amp;quot;stupid&amp;quot; movies, but when I went to the movie&amp;#x27;s comment page on IMDB (&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.imdb.com&amp;#x2F;title&amp;#x2F;tt0118750&amp;#x2F;reference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.imdb.com&amp;#x2F;title&amp;#x2F;tt0118750&amp;#x2F;reference&lt;/a&gt;) I saw that I was not alone in this, all the top comments were giving the movie a rating between 8 and 10 and the commenters were mentioning how hard they had laughed while watching it.&lt;p&gt;The conclusion is that there is something definitely wrong with the way some movies are rated. I&amp;#x27;m not sure if there exists a fix for that, apart from us, the &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; viewers, just starting to ignore reviews and movie-critics and then watching movies with no preconceptions.</text></comment>
<story><title>Is Rotten Tomatoes Killing the Movie Industry? No, Bad Movies Are</title><url>http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/movies/rotten-tomatoes-tom-cruise-baywatch-brett-ratner-new-york-times-20170922.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slg</author><text>These type of articles never explore the potential results of the Rotten Tomatoes voting system.  As the article mentions the RT rating is not a measure of how good a movie is, it is a measure of the percentage of people who viewed the movie positively.  A 100% doesn&amp;#x27;t mean a movie is perfect or even particularly good, it means no one thought it was bad.&lt;p&gt;A movie designed to do well on a RT score needs to please everyone.  The end result is something that tries to be bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive.  As an avid movie goer, that is a horrible result.  I would much rather see a movie that takes risks and fails than something with little ambition outside turning a profit.&lt;p&gt;If you ask people why they don&amp;#x27;t go to the movies more they will often cite the idea that there is nothing new they haven&amp;#x27;t seen before (besides the complaints you hear about prices).  That is another way of phrasing this exact problem.  It is becoming more and more risky to innovate and try something new.  You end up with lots of sequels, remakes, and other cookie cutter projects.  It is safer to invest in the next mediocre superhero movie that most people will be fine with than an innovative middle budget drama that might have a harder time finding an audience.  That is what is hurting the movie industry.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Retric</author><text>Bland movies don&amp;#x27;t actually rate all that highly in practice.&lt;p&gt;Spiderman homecoming got a 92% from critics and 89% from fans because people got what they expected from the movie.  The Hitman&amp;#x27;s Bodyguard on the other hand rated poorly 38%:71% because it failed to deliver.&lt;p&gt;And really, general ratings need to be in the context of the kind of person that might like the movie.</text></comment>