Rotten Tomatoes scores getting manipulated
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Box Office
merry christmas — 2 years ago(September 07, 2023 11:33 PM)
Not really a surprise.
https://www.vulture.com/article/rotten-tomatoes-movie-rating.html
In 2018, a movie-publicity company called Bunker 15 took on a new project: Ophelia, a feminist retelling of Hamlet starring Daisy Ridley. Critics who had seen early screenings had published 13 reviews, seven of them negative, which translated to a score of 46 percent on the all-important aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes — a disappointing outcome for a film with prestige aspirations and no domestic distributor.
But just because the “Tomatometer” says a title is “rotten” — scoring below 60 percent — it doesn’t need to stay that way. Bunker 15 went to work. While most film-PR companies aim to get the attention of critics from top publications, Bunker 15 takes a more bottom-up approach, recruiting obscure, often self-published critics who are nevertheless part of the pool tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. In another break from standard practice, several critics say, Bunker 15 pays them $50 or more for each review. (These payments are not typically disclosed, and Rotten Tomatoes says it prohibits “reviewing based on a financial incentive.”)
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. The writer of a negative review says that Bunker 15 lobbied them to change it; if the critic wanted to “give it a (barely) overall positive then I do know the editors at Rotten Tomatoes and can get it switched,” a Bunker 15 employee wrote. I also discovered another negative review of Ophelia from this period that was not counted by Rotten Tomatoes, by a writer whose positive reviews of other Bunker 15 films have been recorded by the aggregator. Ophelia climbed the Tomatometer to 62 percent, flipping from rotten to “fresh.” The next month, the distributor IFC Films announced that it had acquired Ophelia for release in the U.S.
Bunker 15’s main business appears to be small films released to VOD with little other promotion; it often helps them meet the five-review threshold required to receive a Tomatometer score. The company’s website mentions micro-indies such as Cold November, Tulsa, and Busman’s Holiday, which have only a smattering of reviews each. But Bunker 15 has worked on medium-size titles, too. According to critics who have transacted with the company, these include 2022’s Wildflower with Kiernan Shipka and Alexandra Daddario, 2023’s Burt Reynolds: The Last Interview, and Bruce Willis’s Gasoline Alley, whose 2022 release was overshadowed by news that Willis had been diagnosed with aphasia and may not have been aware he was still making movies. (I found negative reviews of several 2023 movies, including one of the above, on a Bunker 15–affiliated site, where, unlike their author’s other reviews, they were apparently hidden from Rotten Tomatoes.) -
merry christmas — 2 years ago(September 14, 2023 12:01 AM)
They may have done that for the Bunker 15 reviews that they could find but they probably cannot detect a review that has been paid for and as the article says Rotten Tomatoes is owned by Fandango which sells movie tickets so they don't have much of an incentive to go after people artificially boosting ratings. Bunker 15 targeted streaming movies so Fandango has no interest in protecting them.