[ernestipark]

Rotten tomatoes is actually very useful if you know the magic formula:

* If tomatometer & audience score are within 5% of each other, you can trust the ratings to give you a decent indiciation of movie quality.

* If tomatometer is more than 15%+ higher than audience score, it means it's an artsy fartsy movie that critics like and movies don't.

* If audience score is 15%+ higher than tomatometer, it's a fun movie even if it's not oscar worthy. (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/old_school is a perfect example)

[paulddraper]

Okay, let's give that a whirl

---

The Last Jedi

Tomatometer 91% Audience 41%: Artsy Fartsy

[Really?]

---

The Greatest Showman

Tomatometer 56% Audience 86%: Fun, not oscar worthy

[Won Oscar for Best Original Song]

---

EDIT: Truthfully, it was the release of these two films (both Dec 2017) that caused the Tomatormeter and I to part ways. Simply indefensible, IMO.

[eindiran]

I can't comment on "The Greatest Showman" since I haven't seen it, but on a certain level "The Last Jedi" was kind of artsy fartsy; Rian Johnson spent so much time on cinematography and color grading[0] that he ended up with a movie that was visually very striking, without any plot fundamentals that felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.

[0] Think space-walrus cliffs, or red-salt Hoth, or lightspeed kamikazee, or the Snoke throne room battle

[notJim]

Ehh, I feel like if you broaden the system slightly, it still works.

TLJ: cultural elites liked the whole burning the sacred texts thing, normies hated it. (NB: I only vaguely remember this movie and don't have strong opinions about it, don't crucify me.)

The Greatest Showman: I assume "not oscar worthy" meant specifically not "Best Picture" worthy. It's a specific type of movie that wins that award.

In any case, just like you append " reddit" to most searches, I recommend appending " letterboxd" to any movie searches. You do kind of have to read the reviews instead of just going by the rating though.

[dale_glass]

It sorta fits for TLJ. It's a movie with interesting ideas that break the mold vs the previous movie. I can see how critics might find it more interesting. Compared to TFA it's interesting to think about.

But it sucks from the point of view of watching something enjoyable, and especially so if you were looking for a straight follow-up of TFA.

[bmelton]

For me, it was after they invited a new batch of reviewers who ended up bumping Citizen Kane from RT's "best movie all time" down a bunch of slots to such an extent that it was outranked by Paddington 2

I still use the ratings (because they're built into Plex) but mostly as a novelty, and sometimes as a puzzlement. Increasingly, you see scores like 5% tomato, 95% audience (or vice versa!) that I'm sure mean _something_ but rarely anything to me.

[0x457]

TLJ was review bombed (movie sucked tho). Critics gave a good score out of fear imo. It's just an outlier for that rule.

Oscar worthy - best picture, best actor, etc. Best original song isn't a top tier category. That year also had weak competition.

The Greatest Showman was nominated in a single category, and it lost to Coco. I don't know where you got that it won. Coco got nominated in two categories, one of which was important, and won both. Coco also within 3% difference on rotten tomatoes.

[daveguy]

I don't think "Best Original Song" negates the heuristic. Generally when someone talks about "Oscar Worthy" they are generally considering the original categories or even just best picture, director, actress, actor, etc. Maybe best original screen play added in 1940. Not to diminish the performers or writers of the Best Original Song, it's still an awesome achievement. Just more personal than something like Best Picture.

[alonsonic]

TLJ: from a technical film POV this movie was actually great. Strong cinematography, interesting twists in the script and overall good acting and pacing. The issue is that it was a very bad "star wars" movie. A lot of fans felt it didn't do the traditional Star Wars characters and story justice. I agree with both critics and fans.

TGS: It didn't win an oscar for best song, it was nominated. Regardless of that, best song is not usually considered a top category in the Oscar's from a film critic POV. That would be best movie, director, script, actor/actress.

[goto11]

The Last Jedi was incredibly successful. According to Wikipedia is "the highest-grossing film of 2017 and the ninth-highest-grossing film of all time." I have a hard time believing an audience score of 41% accurately reflects the opinions of the actual audience.

[colordrops]

It's more than two dimensions. For instance, The Last Jedi measure doesn't take into account Disney extorting and/or paying off critics to boost the movie.

[fasterik]

I don't necessarily disagree with this as a rule of thumb, but I thought it would be fun to come up with a few counter-examples. Most of these I would consider "artsy-fartsy" or "artsy-fartsy lite" movies that are popular with audiences but less so with critics.

Lost Highway (1997) - 68% Tomatometer - 87% Audience Score

Fight Club (1999) - 79% Tomatometer - 96% Audience Score

American Psycho (2000) - 68% Tomatometer - 85% Audience Score

Requiem for a Dream (2000) - 78% Tomatometer - 93% Audience Score

Dancer in the Dark (2000) - 69% Tomatometer - 91% Audience Score

Oldboy (2003) - 82% Tomatometer - 94% Audience Score

The Prestige (2006) - 77% Tomatometer - 92% Audience Score

Joker (2019) - 69% Tomatometer - 88% Audience Score

[alonsonic]

You went for very old movies which skews your analysis.

A lot of the old movies you picked are famous and popular in movie pop culture. Audience scoring this in RT probably went out of their way to watch these films, they are not as organic as recent scores as you have a larger number audience scores created by movie lovers.

If you find examples post 2015 when RT became a mainstream scoring system that would be great.

Only movie that's current in your list is "The Joker" which among critics is considered to be a copycat of other critically acclaimed films (taxi driver, the comedian). This is a film that tried hard to look artsy fartsy but was not.

[joenot443]

I find in the last decade or so, movies with a big disparity between Audience/Critics are often that way because of culture war silliness unrelated to the content of the actual film.

See -

Sound of Freedom (2023) - 60% Tomoatometer - 99% Audience Score

[dvt]

Weird top post considering the context of the article here is Rotten Tomatoes reviews literally being bought. Might need to include bribery in your formula.

[lolinder]

Yeah, I think their "artsy fartsy" category needs to be split. If the reviewers are consistently positive while everyone else is negative, it tends to be in one of these categories:

* Overly artsy

* Overly political. Reviewers feel the need to give it a positive review because they agree with the message, while the audience will split because they're not as homogenous politically.

* Outraged fans. Reviewers aren't typically fans of a given franchise and so won't notice if it ruins something that would irritate a fan. The Last Jedi is in this category.

* Bribery.

[0x457]

You also need to understand how rating works there in general.

80% fresh means that 80% of reviews are "positive" it's not 8/10 how some people like to think.

[slg]

It is surprising how many people here don't know that. A 100% movie is not the best movie of all time, it is just a movie that no one disliked.

I would much rather watch a movie that has a 50% on RT and a 70 on Metacritic than a movie that has 100% on RT and a 70 on Metacritic. I might not like that 50% movie, but those ratings show some people really love it. The 100% movie's ratings show that everyone kinda likes it, but few people feel strongly about it meaning it is probably not a very interesting watch.

[munchler]

These days IMDb user reviews are the most reliable source. It’s easy to scan a few dozen to see what most people think and discard outliers if you want. The wisdom of crowds is unmatched.

[alonsonic]

I don't agree. Let's begin by making clear that art is subjective so what I'm stating depends on personal taste.

I believe IMBD can help you identify the "most popular" movie. But it's up to you to decide if that's a good indicator for quality.

To give you an example, look at the top 10 songs in Spotify worldwide and tell me if those songs are the "best" songs the art form can provide.

After going deep on an art form, being music, painting, sculpting or film making, you start to develop a taste and an appetite for more complex expressions.

What would you prefer, votes of 10 people that have watched over 1000 films or votes of 1000 people that have watched 10 films?

[voytec]

Funny that iMDb is owned by Amazon and their retail platform is infested with counterfeit products and filled with reviews not worth looking at.

[gniv]

I thought this too until I saw how even popular shows can be manipulated.

The TV show "King the Land" is a Korean drama that aired on cable in Korea this summer and was released at the same time on Netflix worldwide. It was very popular in Korea [1] and many Asian countries. But if you look at IMDB [2] it has a 4.2 rating, with 116 thousand votes of 1/10. Similar Korean shows typically have ratings in the 7-9 range. The reason for the low rating is a controversy over a minor character in the show. I don't know how this mass voting was organized, but it seems to have worked in affecting the IMDB score (and similarly on RT).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_the_Land#Viewership

[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26693803/

[ipqk]

I gets heavily brigaded early on by right-wingers that downvote anything with non-white or LGTBQ+ characters. Just look for reviews that say "woke" or "urban" or "ethnic".

[nmfisher]

IMDb reviews are reliable…as long as you wait a few months after something is released. Pre-release/release reviews are clearly manipulated.

[NL807]

I would be inclined interpret it like this:

* Tomatometer ≫ Audience, there is artificial bias on the critics side, perhaps due to political reasons, or perhaps due social conforming by film critics within a clique, or reviews are being paid for by the film industry.

* Tomatometer ≪ Audience, probably more fun, or less serious film, or may have politically confronting themes that critics don't like to praise.

* Tomatometer ≈ Audience, rating is probably a good indicator of film quality.

[alonsonic]

"Politically confronting themes" sounds like is very relative to your own political leaning.

Probably more in line with the idea that film critics have an inherent type of political inclination being a small, creative niche.

[winternett]

If a service becomes untrustworthy, it should be unseated as a credible source, so that it can be replaced by something else that is more credible. Lots of good businesses and ideas wither and die because of the populist sentiment of only supporting monopolies consumers often have have online.

We ritually act online as if trying to create workarounds for obviously corruptible services will make things better, but it simply doesn't. It only serves to keep rewarding companies that have sold us out, including the process of normalizing the sale and security compromise of our user data. Supporting bad apps and companies after breaches of trust only works to reward them and undermine reliability overall for ethical services and companies. Workarounds also enable companies to breach trust more and more over time as well... Class action lawsuits are also no consolation, as they only cost a fraction of the illicit gains a company makes on being willfully corrupt, and they mostly reward law firms, not victims.

I hope we change this workaround narrative, and start holding bad business accountable for it's schemes instead of embracing it as normalized behavior. LET THEM FAIL. :/

[dude187]

Even better example in the "You might also like" list in Grandma's Boy: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/grandmas_boy

15% tomatometer, 85% audience score.

Sure it's a dumb stoner comedy, but it's an _amazing_ one. Being "dumb" is half the fun, but of course that translates into "more gross than comedic" and "lazy and unrewarding"

[PeterStuer]

The post 2014 version reads: "If tomatometer is more than 15%+ higher than audience score, it means the film is critically 'on message'"

[keepamovin]

Who founded Rotten Tomat? Are they on HN?

I like your test, but I recently watched "Platonic" series and loved it. But Tomat says 93%, Plebs only concede 74% -- I declare it is not Art house.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/platonic/s01

[brokencode]

Low audience vs critic reviews can also indicate review bombing. This often happens on films or TV shows targeted by rightwing media for being too “woke”.

The show that always sticks in my mind as an example is HBO’s Watchmen, which has 96% with critics and 56% with the audience.

[tick_tock_tick]

I think anti-woke review bombing is vastly overestimated. I think the opposite is more common honestly news articles get written about something being "review bombed" and then you get a much larger sea of 5 stars artificially inflating the score.

The Watchmen TV show is a horrible example as it's literally fan-fiction with little to no real connection to the graphic novel. So that fact alone pissed a lot of people off.

It completely ignored the only actual "squeal" (Doomsday Clock) to create the story they wanted to tell while borrow the popularity of the name to get attention.

Even ignoring all that did you actually even watch it? 96% is complete bullshit. 96% means some of the best TV ever made. I don't think it's a 56% but the 56% is way closer to reality then the 96%.

[dotnet00]

I feel like your framing of the issue is too one-sided. Many times the "rightwing media" driven review bombing is about beloved series being damaged/unfaithful. That just happens to often be traced back to politics because it's an easy way to paint all critics as bigots.

Eg Captain Marvel or She Hulk being generally disliked compared to Iron Man, Hulk or Captain America, The Last Jedi being disliked in the Star Wars community or in gaming, The Last of Us Part 2 being much more controversial than the original.

Put aside the politics for a bit and actually pay attention to the arguments and it becomes clear that people aren't specifically complaining that Captain Marvel is a woman, but that she isn't interesting or likable. Similarly TLOU2 wasn't controversial primarily because of the trans character, but because it essentially wrecked what people liked so much about the original for seemingly no meaningful reason. When faced with that, it's unsurprising that the conclusion tends to be that the series was sacrificed at the altar of politics.

This is such a common tactic in gaming when a game is controversial, just lean on the claim that gamers are typically bigots and get away with anything because most people don't want to be called bigots. It's why Steam Reviews are preferable to reviews from journalists on whether or not a game is worth playing.

[cameronh90]

Conversely, I find that often very "woke"/political films are rated overly highly on RT compared to how much I enjoy them. I'm not right wing, it just isn't going to make me enjoy an otherwise mediocre film.

Black Panther, for example, was a perfectly fine film... but who isn't bored of Marvel stuff now, and is it really worth 96%? Higher than The Dark Knight? And even that was probably somewhat overrated due to Health Ledger's passing...

[takeda]

It works the other way look up Sound of Freedom 60% critics, 99% (not long ago it was 100%) audience. You can't make it any more obvious.

[mikrotikker]

And vice versa for leftwing media for being too "offensive".

And example would be Dave Chapelles specials.

[_the_inflator]

Very close call for Goonies with discrepancy of 14: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/goonies

I opt for the audience in this case.

[martin1975]

That's been my 'magic formula' for RT ratings as well :).

[croes]

Fast X

Critics 56%

Audience 84%

That movie wasn't fun. It was the first part in the series where hoped the bad guy wins.

In the previous films the nonsense physics was at least entertaining.

[banannaise]

This completely ignores both the primary subject of the article (astroturfed "critic" reviews) and another phenomenon mentioned (review brigading, particularly one-star reviews from right-wing trolls).

[dylan604]

The Last Temptation of Christ was my first experience with the right-wing/religious uproar about a movie was as a teen still keeping peace with the parental units by attending mom's church. At the time, I really had no interest in seeing the movie, but not because the preacher man said not to. Just wasn't my thing. However, it was very eye opening on the weaponization of the pulpit and only accelerated my move away from church.

[mpweiher]

> artsy fartsy movie that critics like and movies don't

Or woke. Critics love woke, at least officially. Audiences not so much. I suspect critics also do not actually like those movies in private.

[gadders]

That doesn't matter. They're important and have a message. Sadly not everyone in the world has the same bien pensant beliefs as the critics.