Although RT tends to produce false positives for me, it is a reasonably reliable filter. If Hollywood is suffering, I'd look to the quality of its product.
For example, marvel civil war is a false positive (for me). When I watch it, I can't get past the clipped, contrived dialogue, close-ups on faces, ham-fisted plots, inconceivably stupid action, schizophrenic scene changes, plastic cgi, and awkward obviously demographically targeted identity fantasies.
But the movie Valerian and the city of a thousand planets, which was panned on RT, was in almost every way actually objectively worse than its well rated marvel counterpart. It was so bad it made me fill physically ill.
Through accumulated experience, I've found that RT, for me, is a reasonable predictor of "a very bad time." And even if its high ratings don't consistently predict a good time, they do predict relative enjoyability well.
I've had so many awful movie going experiences over the last twenty years of adulthood that I've more or less stopped going. I have a very hard time blaming a rating system. I'd look instead to very shallow, implausible scripting (punchy one-liners, hollow melodrama), lackluster cinematography (zoomed in facials, schizophrenic shot switching), repetitive and/or assinine plots (corporations are eeevil), weird editing and incoherent writing (random, poorly interjected side stories or comedy, bizarre scene shifts, prolonged melodrama), boring, implausible, drawn out action (ugh), predictable demographically targeted identity fantasies, and I don't know, the list goes on.
I know beyond certainty that I'm not the target audience, but I can't help but think people are increasingly demanding movies that repay rather than punish sustained attention, and I can't help but think that these qualities passively improve the commercial value of the Hollywood product.
I helped produce a short film called Confidential Informant. We poured our hearts and wallets into the film. I am very proud of the result. We (sort of, I'm currently in college so I have been reduced to editing scripts, crafting one pagers, and sitting on conference calls) are about to set out on a few more endeavors and quality, originality, and financial success for our investors and contractors is paramount. We hire quality over quantity. We want to make good movies that make enough money to make more.
I write all this to highlight two points: it is not just mindless recreations and rebrands out there (I have to believe that we are not the only indy guys who want to make good pictures) and there is good content out there, but like all good things you must work to find it.
When I get tipsy and hopeful, I dream of seeking funding from the likes of HN folks (y'all definitely talk like you could afford to invest in low budget pictures) instead of the withered, myopic folks who do the bulk of investing now. Film is risky, and people want guaranteed ROI. The climate is such that people want guaranteed winners and few will take risks on unknown quantities, directors, scripts and production companies alike.
Sorry for the ramble, but every time I hear someone complain about the state of film these days, my first response is, "what are you willing to do to change that?"
If anyone is interested in getting involved with a small and hungry production company hit me up. We don't need you to win but we'd love to have you.
Please update your HN profile with some kind of contact or website information. Currently it has nothing. It'd be easier for people to check here than search online and try to find out more.
I used to like action movies but they had a somewhat realistic everyman element to them and the characters were if not entirely relateable at least sympathetic. But Hollywood's love affair with impossible physics; shooting someone doesn't send them flying, you can't outrun explosions, not everything explodes into a giant gasoline ball of flame, etc, has ramped up to the point where it takes me out of suspension of disbelief. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and everyone's flying around on wires? Sure, it's genre-specific and makes sense in context. Every movie ever made in the last 10 years? Not so much.
>I've had so many awful movie going experiences over the last twenty years of adulthood that I've more or less stopped going. I have a very hard time blaming a rating system. I'd look instead to very shallow, implausible scripting (punchy one-liners, hollow melodrama), lackluster cinematography (zoomed in facials, schizophrenic shot switching), repetitive and/or assinine plots (corporations are eeevil), weird editing and incoherent writing (random, poorly interjected side stories or comedy, bizarre scene shifts, prolonged melodrama), boring, implausible, drawn out action (ugh), predictable demographically targeted identity fantasies, and I don't know, the list goes on.
Those are present in modern movies, and I agree to your characterization of the Marvel franchise etc, but you seem to be randomly going to various movies and suffering from that?
I find it's more consistent to have a few favorite directors, with which work you have a longer term relationship, and understand better. E.g. I'd go to any David Fincher movie, and 95% of the time I wont be disappointed even if they vary widely in subject and scope (B.Button was kind of a flop).
And of course lots more obscure directors (someone like Hal Hartley or Kar-Wai Wong for me) with consistent quality.
Perhaps you are wrong and if you got your film recommendation elsewhere, you would find films you loved, then afterward be surprised that they have just 46% ratings on RT. Also you call it a reliable filter but spend half of your comment complaining about films that pass it.
Perhaps it's a reliable filter of movies that are "so bad it makes you feel physically ill" - but would anyone have recommended those films for you?
I recommend you get your film recommendations elsewhere, ignoring RT unless it's sub 10%. That's approximately what I do.
It's like how HN and /r/programming users brag by hating on things that are popular and loving the esoteric such that they peacock to the other neckbeards about how refined their tastes are. Ugh, DAE hate Javascript?
I prefer IMDB user ratings and Metacritic's user ratings, basically the opinions of the unwashed masses who can at least tell you if a movie is actually enjoyable.
Critics may be bad signals when conditioned on the things that you individually prefer. this is hardly an objective measure.
Your preference for user ratings could also be biased towards the kind of things that you enjoy about movies, which may align more with non-critics, while at the same time my preference for (aggregrated) critic ratings could be biased towards the things i enjoy about movies, which might align more with critics; those two sets of things might not exactly be the same. (i.e. there could be tribes that rate enjoyableness differently)
Lastly, there is this [1], which is tangential to your claim but worth considering what a good distribution of ratings should look like. Now even though the analysis isn't perfect, it's still interesting that _if_ the assumptions of the analysis were true, metacritic has the most well-behaved distribution.
In general the trick with critics is to find those that you agree with on certain genres. No critic is really going to agree with you on everything. So find some that align with you on say action movies and some on dramas and interpolate a score. Eventually you learn their preferences and you can get a very good read on if you'll like a movie with just one or 2 critic reviews. You'll learn that some are into filming or score or other things more than you and you can ignore that.
I'd add that, if you don't know the individual critic's taste, they might as well be another take on public opinion. There can be something to be gained, but for the everyday person, you are best off with "what did the general public think" and what did this person (whose tastes I know) think?
A good example (I think, at least when ignoring drama) is Total Biscuit. He makes it clear when playing a genre of game he doesn't care for or if a game is in a setting he loves. He lays it out and tries to be fair and objective (even if that pursuit is a fool's errand).
P.S. I'd also like to say that the pursuit of an unachievable goal (objectivity, perfection, etc...) is a noble pursuit even if unobtainable, as it will cause a drive to be better and improve. Rather than an excuse to be lazy since, "perfect/objective/... is impossible.
Also, an interesting thing about metacritic (at least from what I can remember) is that they are silent about how they weight differing review sites/critics in how they calculate their overall rating.
Whereas (as far as I know) RT has a simple average for critic reviews and general internet user reviews.
It sounds like you've been going to the wrong movies, at least for your tastes. You seem to be exclusively seeing blockbusters. Maybe you'd prefer smaller, less action-focused films.
Eh, I love a good action movie, but it's hard to get into movies that you can't believe. I watched a very low rated one from the 80s the other day (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blood_of_heroes/), and while it had very little plot, and the production value was incredibly low compared to recent movies, and just generally wasn't a very good movie, I enjoyed it more than the vast majority of very expensive recent blockbusters, because it felt real. They had real actors and real stunts. They moved like real people. And in that world, a 50 foot fall could kill them, rather than just cause them to touch a knee, so there was something at stake.
In a movie full of invincible people, who cares what happens? They'll be fine regardless.
I wish hollywood would get to making movies about real people.
I have. Definitely better than the superhero flicks that plague theaters, but he's still got that invulnerable mechanical efficiency that gets a bit old after he's plowed through the 50th person in a 10 minute shootout. I'm talking more like Die Hard, Alien, Air Force One, or even First Blood, where the main character is a mostly regular person with some combat training, is in a situation where they're believably screwed, and has to rely on their wits to survive the odds stacked against them, not just their incredible reflexes.
One thing John Wick gets right though, is that they took their time with the choreography and training rather than using shaky cam and jump cuts to cover the fact that the actors have no idea what they’re doing. Keanu Reeves spent a lot of time learning how to handle firearms and it shows.
My only complaint is that I would prefer they figure out some way to simulate firearm recoil. As a hobby / target shooter it always takes away from the action when I see guns rock steady every shot. If guns were like that everyone would be John Wick.
Yeah, to be honest the rare action movie that really made me invested into the action lately was The Raid (2011), which was shot in a way that made the action sequences look significantly more realistic and you didn't get the feeling that anyone has plot armor in it.
I similarly enjoyed that movie. It skimps a lot on the plot to provide the best action I've ever seen. The meat of the movie all takes place in one building and if you don't count the small pauses, is basically one giant action scene.
The thing I find crazy is that in 2017 $20M movies with B-list names are getting picked up as "independent". Ridley Scott's name shows up on IFC movies now; It Follows had an excellent ROI compared to most "blockbuster"; Get Out was a sold-out hit with audiences and critics... but it's all just a blip compared to the latest Transformers or DC or Marvel franchise shit-show.
A few millenia from now archaelogists and historians will be pontificating about Hollywood the way we do about the Pyramids.
It's like someone said "lets make all those comics teenage nerds used to love into movies for adults -- while not only keeping everything as simplistic but making it even more simplistic and shallow".
I was reading all the Marvel stuff when I was a kid/young teenager (5-6 comic magazines every week) but I never understood the point behind modern superhero movies. Those comics were shallow and childlish as well, but, depending on the writer, sometimes touched things beyond that, and at the very least, they explorer some subjects that mattered to their audience: young teenagers.
Today's superheroes movies are watched by 20 to 40 year olds as well, and they don't put any effort to matter at all.
Even Nolan's Batman is at a young teenage level understanding of the world, it just has better cinematography and more than the average comic-movie gore (because it's allowed to show that to kids nowadays) but no real life grit (because that's considered too confusing and adult) and no sexuality either (ditto). The plots and the "moral dilemmas" in the movies are laughable ( https://xkcd.com/1004/ ).
Maybe Logan points to a future where such movies can be actually good, but it's not exactly there yet either.
good point! And you're right, I do have those preferences. I guess I wasn't lamenting my own situation (I personally feel blessed to have as much art available to me as I do). I was trying to make a pretty awkward point, which was that even though I understand my conscious preferences aren't shared by most audience members, I think a failure to "satisfice" on some features of artistic quality might be reducing the value of the product for everyone, and hence the profitability of blockbuster movie studios. It's a hypothesis, anyway.
edit: re-reading I see that I used "movie-going" to mean "going to the Regal Cinema 17 with extended family and seeing a Hollywood movie," which makes it sound like I'm throwing going to movies period under the bus.
Rotten Tomatoes is owned by a Time Warner and Comcast, they're ratings now end up wildly biased. That's why there are so many decent movies that end up being '93%' etc.
"since January 2010 has been owned by Flixster, which was, in turn, acquired in 2011 by Warner Bros. In February 2016, Rotten Tomatoes and its parent site Flixster were sold to Comcast's Fandango. Warner Bros. retained a minority stake in the merged entities"
Rotten Tomatoes now uses 'Top Critics' to compile their overall score instead of 'All Critics'. This distinction didn't originally exist.
As the Wikipedians say, [citation needed]. Yes, Rotten Tomatoes is owned by Fandango, but they appear to be using essentially the same methodology that they always have: look at a bunch of reviews of a given movie, decide that review is "fresh" or "rotten" (which is done objectively based on the reviewers' own star/numerical ratings as much as possible, from what I can see), and tell you how many reviews they've aggregated were "fresh." What bias are you asserting? Are you saying they give Warner Brothers and Universal movies better ratings than competitors? Can you cite plausible examples? Through what devious mechanism are they subverting their aggregation system?
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't mean a movie is perfect or even particularly good, it means no one thought it was bad.
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.
If you ask people why they don't go to the movies more they will often cite the idea that there is nothing new they haven'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.
> 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.
I've just finished watching for the second time a non-bland and pretty-offensive (at least for today's sensibilities) 1997 comedy starring Jamie Foxx and Vivica Fox, among others. It's called "Booty Call". 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'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.
Now, I thought that maybe I'm the crazy one out, a stupid viewer who doesn't understand interesting and thought-provoking movies and who only laughs at "stupid" movies, but when I went to the movie's comment page on IMDB (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118750/reference) 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.
The conclusion is that there is something definitely wrong with the way some movies are rated. I'm not sure if there exists a fix for that, apart from us, the "normal" viewers, just starting to ignore reviews and movie-critics and then watching movies with no preconceptions.
>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.
This is demonstrably untrue. Here is a link (along the left column) of the top RT movies for each year from 2014-2016:
Sure there are some blockbusters, but there are also many excellent, interesting, engaging, even daring films like Moonlight, Hell or Highwater, Manchester by the Sea, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, It Follows, Boyhood, Nightcrawler, and Birdman. And those are just among the top 10 scores for each year; if you expanded to movies in the 90% range of each year you'd have a large number of excellent choices.
I couldn't find a list of the top-rated RT movies for 2017, but (I think) currently the highest-rated among them is Get Out, a film specifically made to be the precise opposite of "bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive".
I submit that you simply choose to watch bad movies.
How does that demonstrate what I said wasn't true? My point wasn't that all movies are bad or that good movies don't score well on RT. My point was that RT doesn't incentivize good movies. It incentives average and risk-averse movies.
It is also worth noting that none of the movies you listed are targeted at wide audiences. The most successful of the list was a surprise hit in Mad Max and even that was just outside the 20 biggest movies of its respective year. The others probably didn't even end up in the top 50 of the year. If you look at the top box office draws you will find the kind of movies I am talking about.
The Princess Kaguya is ranked 14th of 2014 and seems like a perfect counterexample: it managed this despite being a major risk (which resulted in a major box office failure). Unfortunately Rotten Tomatoes can't save a controversial foreign film no matter how good, but it seems that if RT was scoring risk takers poorly Kaguya wouldn't be up there.
> conclusion is that there is something definitely wrong with the way some movies are rated. I'm not sure if there exists a fix for that, apart from us, the "normal" viewers, just starting to ignore reviews and movie-critics and then watching movies with no preconceptions.
That seems like a big takeaway from one false negative. And I agree on Booty Call, I've long put it as one of my funniest movies from the 90's. That's said I didn't watch it in the theater and if the wife and I had gone I'm not sure she would have called it a good 30-40 bucks.
There are probably 3 issues here, critic blind spots (because the median critic is probably over 40 and has some cultural lenses that are hard to shake), the lack of information you can convey with one bit of data (which is an overall goodness bit not a "funniness" bit for comedies), and perhaps the sample size (this movie has only 12 reviews on RT and half are from no-names, more reviews might not change this score though it matters for some others).
FWIW Roger Ebert loved Booty Call and gave it 3 stars so, going beyond the one bit of fresh/rotten, it can lead you to critics that like movies you do and you can follow those personally.
And RT does pretty good at giving you good movies in general - their best comedies of the 90's rightly include Toy Story 1 & 2, Groundhog Day and The Player all of which are purchase worthy.
Bland movies don't actually rate all that highly in practice.
Spiderman homecoming got a 92% from critics and 89% from fans because people got what they expected from the movie. The Hitman's Bodyguard on the other hand rated poorly 38%:71% because it failed to deliver.
And really, general ratings need to be in the context of the kind of person that might like the movie.
A 100% rating doesn't mean no one would think the movie is bad - it means no one who saw the movie thought it was bad.
With the exception of critics, most people watch movies that they expect they will enjoy. If that movie meets or exceeds expectations, it'll be fresh.
Through this perspective, the way to get a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating isn't to make a bland, lowest-common-denominator film, attempting to appeal a little bit to everyone. Rather, it's to make a film that a small niche of people will be enthralled by, and market the film in such a way to attract that audience, and no other audience.
---
Conversely, when a movie is rotten, it didn't merely fail the average viewer, it failed for the people who were excited to see exactly that movie.
>If you ask people why they don't go to the movies more they will often cite the idea that there is nothing new they haven't seen before
I have literally never heard someone say this
>(besides the complaints you hear about prices)
Yup, there it is.
But also, to watch a movie in the cinema I often have to sit in uncomfortably off-center chairs. I can't adjust the volume if I think it's too loud, I can't pause the movie to take a piss and I have to listen to the troglodytes behind me eat popcorn with their mouths open. The movies start at rigidly defined times that may not be convenient for me, I'm not allowed to bring a pizza in, I can't do anything about it if someone has an inconsolable baby or kicks the back of my chair repeatedly and to top it all off there's half an hour of ads before the movie starts.
And yeah, I have to pay $15 for that.
All in all, cinema is still a very 1920's experience, and I don't really want that. I have a 3D home projector man, I got it second hand for like $200. It's not as good as the cinema projector, but I assure you my couch is nicer. I've just delayed my cinema schedule by 6 months. Spiderman: Homecoming is being released soon, I'm pumped. No spoilers please.
> If you ask people why they don't go to the movies more they will often cite the idea that there is nothing new they haven't seen before
I've started skipping a lot of the super-hero movies because they started being all the same to me ("Wonder Woman" was a little different and more interesting, fortunately). The same goes for most of the action moves being filmed today, which pains me to say it because I'm a huge fan of guys like John McTiernan and the way action movies were made in the '80s - early '90s. Maybe it's because I'm getting older? (I'm in my mid-30s now).
I actually like the experience of going to the cinema, with all that it implies, is almost like a ritual. Some people wait for Sunday to come so that they could go to church the same way as I wait for the weekend to come so that I can go to the movies. It would be nice though if tickets were a little less expensive, with that I totally agree.
I thought Wonder Woman was alright. Something about it felt a little "off" to me. It is hard to put my finger on it. Maybe they tried to compress too much plot into the time. I don't know. It was definitely more fun to watch than many of the recent superhero goo moves. Perhaps it was th caricature Germans. On the plus side they did WWI which is as overdone in modern cinema.
Netflix's Marvel shows are interesting too, especially Like Cage. But those aren't movies :)
Not saying tropes are bad, but once someone has seen a lot of narrative entertainment the patterns become pretty obvious. They're generally more acceptable if done in very creative ways. For example, Avatar was fully tropey, but the production was wholly unique.
The way things are setup is also designed to make me feel like I’m being ripped off.
Go to see a brand new very popular movie. They know high ticket prices scare people away, so I can easily get tickets for $9/each (no 3D) for most films. That’s perfectly fair.
A small bottle of water is $6. A small popcorn is like $10.
So the total cost is about $25 but most of that is hidden in two cheap/basic snacks.
How about just charging me the real price for the ticket and fair snack prices? Charge $25 for a pack with a ticket and some snacks.
A low upfront price and high snacks feels like bait-and-switch.
But it works so they keep it up. And I feel ripped off every time I go because of the psychology of their pricing model.
2h without doing anything with my hands is a nightmare.
Normally, I'm doing all kinds of things with my hands. Usually, I'm at a computer, I have my phone, I'm playing with my cane, or I'm flicking my fidget cube, etc. But I can't do any of those things at the movies. I need to snack during movies because I'd go nuts if I didn't have something to do with my hands. A bag of popcorn is a godsend... I can keep grabbing pieces of popcorn and sticking them in my mouth, which keeps my hands occupied.
>Or bring snacks from home (or a convienence store which is a bargain compared to a theatre)
Movie theaters almost universally do not allow outside food or drinks, so that isn't really an option. But these days if I ever go to a movie I pretty much exclusively go to a dine-in theater(alamo drafthouse, studio move grill, etc) because at least there I'm getting decent food instead of a paying $20 for tub of popcorn and soda that cost them probably less than a dollar, not to mention they have comfy recliners instead of those awful padded seats most theaters have.
Just break the rules. I have gone to the movies with food and beer in my back pack over one hundred times and never been searched, or caught in the theatre.
If I'm to just break the rules in order to improve the viewing experience, why should I not go the whole way and just torrent the latest movies to watch at home?
That's true, but as I said before, I've delayed my movie timetable by 6 months, so that doesn't really affect me. Here's the thing I would have those who's job it is to design the movie theater experience understand:
If going to the cinema was free, I would still choose to wait for movies to be released for in home viewing. The cinema experience is /that/ bad.
It depends where you are and how you do it, but copyright infringement is often a civil matter, not a criminal one, just like ignoring the posted conditions of entry of a cinema by sneaking food in.
> It is safer to invest in the next mediocre superhero movie
Thus leading to those "trends" people get faux-excited for (I say that as they completely forget the 'hype' over previous ones when the next one hits) and masking the problem in the first place.
Anyways, "safe but boring" is finance's bread and butter, so looking to big-budget flicks to take risks in the pursuit of good art is a lost cause. They only care insofar as they can get emmy attention to up sales.
Those films are now done by Netflix and Amazon. Just a different model. I used to go to an indie theater twice a week when I was in college and saw every niche film. But those theaters hardly exist any more. The big theater experience just isn't cut out for that. It's barely pleasant enough to go see the latest popcorn movie.
The industry really needs to take at-home seriously.
Lately I find the experience of sitting in an auditorium for several hours profoundly unpleasant. The (to me) nauseating smell of popcorn, the sticky floors, uncomfortable seats, and painfully loud speakers are just not worth it for so many forgettable movies (to say nothing of Prometheus). I took my whole family to see the Force Awakens, though, and none of us were noticed any of this because we were so enthralled by the film. But that's a rare exception to the rule these days.
"The industry" only cares about its own moneymaking; you're not gonna see them roll over and say "hey, you know what's a really good movie?" rather than keep pushing their own formulaic investments.
Even critics aren't going to stop reviewing big-name movies on the grounds that they're all the same recycled shit; reviews of recycled shit likely still earns them far more than their other reviews combined.
> The end result is something that tries to be bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive.
"Happiness" is none of those things, and scored 85 on RT.
> 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.
> 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.
The "innovative middle budget drama[s]" are moving to television. The rise of high-quality programming on cable TV has a lot to do with the state the film industry is currently in.
I find it fascinating that ever since television launched, film has gone out of its way to be different from TV, but the specific way it does that constantly changes. Back in the '70s, it was the opposite from where it is today!
No, they need to please everyone who chooses to see it which means they need to be categorisable before viewing so people can knowledgeably choose not to see it.
> The end result is something that tries to be bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive.
So much this. Also conversely I don't understand how the tyranny of the average issue for polarising movies is not brought up more. Many movies I like aren't obviously appreciated by everyone (too gritty, too awkward, too dumb, too sci-fi...) and end up in the 40-70% range which tells me nothing.
Hollywood movies are getting objectively worse, and there's a good reason for it. The market is global now - the North American box office is just a vehicle for pricing deals when the international rights are sold.
So they have to make movies that appeal to the global lowest common denominator. No witty or understated dialog. No cultural signifiers that might be missed by someone from another culture.
All the money and effort is going into flashy stuff that someone in Beijing will appreciate just as much as someone in Los Angeles. Thus all the superhero garbage and Michael Bay style action.
We also act as if older movies are on whole universally and objectively better than they are now - which they're not - because of the lens of time, we don't remember the 20 stinkers released every year, only the big blockbuster movies that impressed everyone - as an infrequent movie goer - I'd say movies on whole, are about as good as they ever were.
Again, its the same lens of time, there were 2-3 times as many forgettable dramas, romantic comedies, historical pictures, and lets not even start on westerns - they're not even part of our collective memories anymore. Consider that in 1939, there were something like two movies a week released - and 1939 was a banner year for quality too in all honesty - but still only 2-3 have survived in popular memory, and only 10% of the total production was considered notable.
Chaplin was genius, so was Lloyd, so was Keton, they all produced moves of unbelievable quality, but how many of those three are known by people outside the film industry or film historians today?
> So they have to make movies that appeal to the global lowest common denominator
No, they think that they have to do this, but they are demonstrably wrong, as proven by e.g. the "surprise" success of a movie like "Get Out" (which is really excellent, BTW) which breaks all of those rules and makes a ton of money because people can still recognize a good movie even though Hollywood generally can't.
That movie illustrates my point, though. Domestic box office for Get Out was $175m with foreign receipts coming in at just $77m.
Compare that to Guardians of the Galaxy, with domestic box office of $333m and foreign box office of $440m. They made more money outside the US than in, with China topping the totals.
Sure, you can still make money with a movie aimed at the domestic audience, but you can make a lot more money with one that isn't.
Get Out is the exception that proves the rule. It is a smart low budget movie that had good box office numbers, but there are dozens of good movies released this year that will not generate anything like that revenue. How about Columbus, Step, The Big Sick... that's just relatively recent ones I can pick off the list, there are a lot more.
True, and it's a shame because a movie like Train to Busan is more engaging than World War Z or Marvel Civil War, but the latter will rack up more ticket sales. Most people don't care about substance or quality in the end.
A flip side to this... is Rotten Tomatoes boosting movies that would otherwise be ignored, by virtue of excellent ratings?
I'm thinking specifically of Hidden Figures here. Who would ever have thought that we'd see a Star Wars movie (Rogue One) booted out of the #1 spot by a movie about black women doing math?
(This is in no way a criticism of either movie, btw. I loved both of them and consider them high-water marks of recent cinema.)
Maybe. I only go see movies in the theater if the Rotten Tomatoes score is 90+ (otherwise I just wait for redbox). That is the reason why I went to see Hidden Figures. If it had been sub-90 I wouldn't have seen it in the theater and, frankly, by the time it got to Redbox I probably would have passed it right over (which would have been a shame since it was a great movie).
That's quite possible. The article mentioned "_Logan's Lucky_"'s high rating and low box office results. I hadn't heard of this movie at all, but the ratings & reviews on Rotton Tomatoes convinced me to give it a shot, and I quite enjoyed it.
I don't see the problem with that. Rotten Tomatoes is a review site where people judge the quality of a movie, not the popularity of a movie. You're probably thinking of popularity when you say that, because to me, Rogue One was kind of "meh", but that's just my opinion.
What I'm saying is that movies that would otherwise be ignored might be achieving surprise popularity due to strong reviews on Rotten Tomatoes - Hidden Figures as a case in point. It was the #1 movie in America, not some obscure art film, which is the fate I would expect for such a subject, told in such a way. I think popularity followed from quality.
Of course, any ol' movie labeled Star Wars will do well, by virtue of brand.
I once plotted the TSPDT Top 1000 movies by year. That's an all-time ranking voted by critics. The distribution plot peaks around the 1970s and declines since then. For one, post-war European cinema was really great and influenced the American industry.
Now all major movies originate in the same place. The last fresh blood had come mostly from Latin America, Mexico in particular.
And the place for experiments changed. Now it's TV series. If the concept works, they make another season. Two-hour feature films are reserved for proven concepts. For moviegoers, it turns to be more like a social experience, not an arty one.
The movie industry has eras, marked by certain production styles. In Hollywood at least, the 1970s was the era of the auteur director. A wave of directors (and actors) who had apprenticed under the famed B-movie master Roger Corman came to power on the strength of a series of absolute masterpieces. It started with Easy Rider, which was shot on a very low budget, and received massive box office success and critical acclaim. It ended with Heaven's Gate, an outrageously expensive disaster that has never even been properly released (I've seen one of the medium-length edits of it, and yes, it stinks).
The real end of the New Hollywood era, though, was the release of Star Wars in 1977. It paved the way for the sci-fi/fantasy blockbuster. It turned into a successful trilogy, and overlapped team-wise with Spielberg's fantastically successful Raiders of the Lost Ark. Hollywood, and movie fans, lost interest in the more intellectual fare of New Hollywood, in favor of kid-friendly, cross-marketing-friendly entertainment.
So it's not surprising that there was a dropoff in critical darlings after the 1970s. Movies got a lot worse - they really did. Even directors who carried on the New Hollywood traditions, like David Lynch and the Coen brothers, couldn't see the kind of success the 1970s directors had.
Of course, before the New Hollywood era, Hollywood kinda stunk, big expensive extravaganzas. Critical attention then turns to the French New Wave, and other post-WWII European film with small budgets and big emotional punches (who makes a movie like Wages of Fear these days?).
I wonder how our current era will fare? I'm thinking about the sort of epic-story serialization that the Marvel franchise and the reinvigorated Star Wars franchise is doing. How will that be viewed?
The late 60s/70s were an exceptionally creative time. But you need relative economic security to take creative risks, and there's not much of that around at the moment.
I think more than anything what we need is more movies made by low-budget places. I really don't want to see another sequel, redo, or comic book movie. It's just lazy on the part of the movie companies.
This is also because Amazon and Netflix are buying up things that might have otherwise gone to the theaters. Why pay royalties forever when you can just own it forever and amortize the cost?
true, but i think these purchases have a much greater impact on TV that film. Amazon, Netflix, Hulu all have a long list of really successful TV shows but it's hard to think of a 120-minute movie that has risen to the ranks of Handmaiden's Tale, House of Cards, etc..
True, it is affecting both. I was speaking also to the fact that Manchester by the Sea (e.g.) was made by Amazon. A great outcome for them is simply to break even at the theater. They then have an exclusive movie for free forever. The studios can't afford for all of their movies to break even.
I agree, but this exists to a significant extent already (though more would be great) - it's a really, really good time to be into low-budget indie flicks.
The problem is that your local multiplex is not going to be showing independent films, nor are they going to be blasting marketing cranked up to 11 on all channels, so it's much harder to hear about them, and in some cases, much harder to see them period.
But the scene is alive and well - I've gotten a lot more into over the past year or so, and have really enjoyed it. The accessibility is poor in some places (in the middle of Manhattan is pretty great), but absolutely worth it.
I find IMDB and Metacritic to give pretty solid coverage of these films, so that alleviates some of the discoverability problems.
If you have small theaters near you, please patronize them - better yet, convince a group to go regularly. They need the business, and I think you'll find a lot of worthy films.
Things like Fathom Events are already managing to run more niche content a few showings a week. (Example: there's a Studio Ghibli film doing 1 showing an evening at 3 theaters around town for two nights next week.)
It's not inconceivable that we'll eventually see a similar platform for (more) indie movies, using a screen or two a couple evenings a week. Movie theaters are hard up for money, and I suspect would happily take a full theater for any film they can do small batches of.
It's also interesting to me how some of the stigma associated with VOD and straight to video releases has gone away. It's a pretty great time for film and television.
I wouldn't say it's lazy, but it is low risk high reward. If you make a movie of an already popular thing, people who like the popular thing will go watch it.
Making a sequel of that thing means only the people who watched [AND LIKED] the first thing will watch the second one, also ensuring top tier ratings, making more people want to see what makes it so great.
Having original movies is a true blessing; but sequels, remakes, novel and comic book movies are true "office box smashes" with very, very little to risk.
"I am a movie critic by trade, and until recently, I got paid to tell you people which movies merely stink and which ones you shouldn’t screen near an open flame. Well, I’m putting the burden of lousy movies back on you. It’s very simple: if you stop going to bad movies, they’ll stop making bad movies. If the movie used to be a TV show, just don’t go. After Roman numeral II, give it a rest. If it's a remake of a classic, rent the classic. Tell them you want stories about people, not a hundred million dollars of stunts and explosives. People, it’s up to you. If the movie stinks, just don’t go."
There needs to be a term for this delusion - conflating a few people who clamor for something with "people" at large.
"IT'S up to YOU! Change your politicians! Vote with your wallet! Demand better movies/industries/X!" is a horseshit response that conveniently tries to forget that these industries and ecosystems follow a lowest-common-denominator majority, so all the "clamor" and attention-to-personal-choice in the world does nothing except accomplish some fringe action at the margins.
The only "people" listening to you at that point are those who recognize the frustration of dealing with that world, so it's healthier to engage in a substantiative dialogue about what can be done from those margins to renew widespread interest in the actual change you want than to resign with some holier-than-thou tirade to them regarding "the people" who aren't even listening.
If those people do, why are the studio executives complaining? Perhaps it's because "Ticket revenue was down at least 12 percent, and ticket sales were at their lowest point for the season in 10 years. Audiences did not want to see remakes of old TV shows (bad news for Baywatch and CHIPS). They did not want to see badly reviewed franchise entries (the take for the latest Transformers installment was way down)."[1] (linked from the article).
> Audiences did not want to see remakes of old TV shows (bad news for Baywatch and CHIPS).
21/22 jump street suggests the problem isn't with remakes of old shows but rather the quality of the remake. I was interested in baywatch, it got bad reviews so I didn't bother.
People don't want to see bad movies. I'm tired of the idea that comic book movies and sequels are all bad movies.
Novelty is key to entertainment. At some point, having the same three guys show up and fight a villain gets repetitive. The studio likes safe bets because the costs are so high. But you don't get 1977 Star Wars money on things that closely resemble things that came out last year. The movie industry has gone through this kind of cycle before; they enter a very creative few years, and then they go through some greedy lazy years where they try to reissue the things that won a few years ago, tweaked slightly.
The doc starts with a picture of a stupid time-travel sci-fi nonsense, ends with a picture of a stupid magic-monster harrypotter nonsense, in the middle with a picture of the remake of The magnificent seven. Which was the remake of Kurosawa's The 7 samurai. This is only entertaining if you are 14 or you have spent the last 35 years in a cave without contact to the outside world. What is killing the movie industry again?
Good find, seems that the industry is doing just fine:
In 2016, U.S./Canada box office was $11.4 billion, up two percent from $11.1 billion in 2015. Admissions, or
tickets sold (1.32 billion), held steady compared to 2015.
Moviegoer Trends
More than two-thirds (71%) of the U.S./Canada population – or 246 million people – went to the cinema at
least once in 2016, a two percent increase from 2015. Frequent moviegoers – individuals who go to the cinema
once a month or more – continue to drive the movie industry, accounting for 48 percent of all tickets sold in
the United States and Canada.
The number of frequent moviegoers increased in 2016. However, the number of tickets purchased by frequent
moviegoers decreased. This was offset by an increase in the tickets purchased by occasional moviegoers
(moviegoers who attended less than once a month).
and yet the referenced article in the piece [1] doesn't seem to keep the execs from complaining "studio head honchos lay the blame for several months of horrific box office numbers — the worst in 20 years — on the website":
* Generic Super-Hero Movie B. Different title from A, yet actually identical plot and sometimes actors.
* A new CG cartoon "for the whole family". They haven't had an original idea since Wall-E.
* Generic block-buster action movie with robots and/or ninjas or ninja-robots, explosions, Chevrolet placement ads, and at least 2 pairs of extremely shapely female breasts.
* Generic ultra-patriotic military-hero-worship action flick where rugged, muscly bearded Alpha-Macho super-bros kill brown people, usually has the word "American" in the title, and a scene-that-lasts-too-long where Rick tearfully tells Sam to tell his wife he loves her as his guts slowly (all too slowly) fall out of his torn-up torso.
* Generic coming-of-age and beating-all-odds story about a lovable but bullied lonely/introverted/gay/black/Muslim kid from the streets/ghetto/Pakistan who overcomes all odds to be his neighborhood's/high-school's/country's star juggler/drummer/dancer/stripper/singer/refugee-turned-Nobel-laureate and gets the girl/boy at the end.
* A documentary telling me I'm fat, living in a banana republic Orwellian surveillance police-state dystopia with horrible health-care and a deteriorating environment.
* Girl-Squad/Bro-team Buddy Comedy with a bunch of 45-year-olds acting like rich, spoiled, immature 18-year-olds at friend X's wedding. Hilarity ensues.
Basically, I'm either being bored out of my mind for the whole duration, or sad/frustrated that this world is so horrible/unjust, or watching a 120-minute commercial for Pepsi/Chevrolet/Sex, or being actively recruited for the Marines.
That's pretty interesting. TV used to be the home for schlock and quality story telling was mostly done by movies. These days, if you want to tell a substantial story with depth, you do it on television. Movies are to television as short stores are to novels.
Yeah, it’s flipped. Part of that is more control when working for TV, part of it is the ability to tell a story in more than 120m. Let’s you explore much deeper things or have way more character development.
And also lower budget - due to "cheap" actors, even the most high-budget TV shows don't come close to a single Hollywood blockbuster which makes them a significantly less risky investment. Hence you see more innovation and tryouts - similar to indie/AA gaming market vs. AAA gaming blockbusters.
You don't need muscle mass. All you need to understand as a smaller person is how to use two things to your advantage:
1) your own low mass, which makes you by definition more agile than your opponent
2) the kinetic energy of your opponent.
It takes training, yes, but given that I've seen a 1.65m pixie cop bring down a 2m Russian hulk in a bar fight, alone, in 15 seconds, many movie scenes are not that unrealistic.
The exception that proves the rule. They often show tiny women winning in tests of strength! It's ludicrous and insulting to the audience, almost as much as the wisecracking black guy stereotype. When was the last time you saw a black guy in a film that wasn't all tough/street etc?
The movie industry doesn't seem to be able to figure out if a movie will be a dud up front. Most of the dud movies are broken at the script and actor selection phase. Maybe productions need to do a staged reading in front of an audience as a test before going into production. Perhaps with slides and sketches from the storyboard for the action.
The CG people have their act together. When was the last time a big-budget movie flopped because the special effects were done badly? Effects are carrying many weak movies. People don't realize until it's over that it sucked.
I’ve just finished reading ‘Adventures in the screen trade’ by William Goldman, the guy who wrote ‘All The President’s Men’, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid’ and ‘The Princess Diaries’.
While written in the early 80s, it’s thoroughly entertaining and very insightful as to how movies actually get made. His main point is that nobody knows anything. No one knows why one film was a hit and another wasn’t. So successful properies/stars/directors are milked for all they’re worth until suddenly they’re not.
> Most of the dud movies are broken at the script and actor selection phase.
Nothing kills a movie quite like a bad script. You can pair up a lot of very similar winners and losers and see that the key difference is the script. Compare for example Baywatch and 22 Jump Street. Both rehashed Gen-X era TV shows about good-looking people. 22 Jump Street was smart, self-aware, and successful.
Since few bombs do have good scripts, you would think studio execs would simply never put a weak script into production. While you can have a successful film with a shitty script, why risk it? Especially given how cheap it is to change a script early on.
Given that they seemingly don't, there's probably some other forces in play. Probably some combination of:
1. Maybe it's just really hard to evaluate a script early on. There's probably some truth to this, but I don't think much. Film execs read a lot of scripts and it's an easily trainable skill.
2. Maybe the script starts out good but gets screwed up because of perverse incentives. This is, I think, a bigger part of it. The director wants to put their mark on it. A big-name star wants their character to get more screen time. All of a sudden, there are forces pushing on the script that make it better for the people making the movie, but not for the view.
3. Corporate politics at the studio comes into play. A studio brings on a script doctor who is compelled to earn their check by making a certain amount of changes even if the script didn't need them. An exec owes someone a favor and gets a role jammed in for a particular actor. An exec got burned on a previous film about shark and says all sharks must be removed from all scripts.
4. Then the reality of production, scheduling and budget. You read a lot of stories about subplots that had to be cut because they ran out of money, scenes that were rushed because of location access, etc. I think a lot of times, the movie you watch is not the movie that was described on paper. It's not uncommon for screenwriters to take their name off a film because the final result of production hell isn't what they wrote.
Film execs read a lot of scripts and it's an easily trainable skill.
Reading scripts and summarizing them down to a standard two-page format is a standard part of the filter. An actress/model/waitress friend used to do that for extra cash. Film execs mostly read those executive summaries.
What about the second part of the line you quoted? What do you think about actor selection?
One of my favorite things is seeing a movie with an actor that I'm not familiar with and being blown away by their performance. Some big actors (like Tom Cruise) I never quite forget that I'm watching Tom Cruise act and that takes away something from the experience.
Gary Oldman is a counter example. He's so good that I often don't notice him.
I poked around some best and worst box office lists before writing my comment and couldn't get much of a sense of how casting impacts things. I can't think of a lot of movies offhand that failed because of poor cast choices that didn't also have other problems. Likewise I don't know many that succeeded in spite of them (except for horror films, where cast seems to be relatively unimportant).
My impression is that there are so many people who want to act that it's a buyer's market and most films can afford good enough talent.
From what I saw, by a very large margin, the largest signal of what leads to success in films is familiarity. Almost every winner in the past decade was a sequel, remake, or part of a larger cinematic universe.
Something to keep in mind, a lot of movies when bought are good, but then people come in and muck with the script (either producers/execs tell the original screenwriter to make these changes, or they hire someone else to do it).
Hollywood has a collection of processes that allow people with little experience in telling stories to influence how said stories are told, and then those who come after have to deal with the fallout. It is more than a little gross.
Counterpoint: My wife and I mostly liked the Beauty and the Beast remake. The script changes and new songs relative to the animated original were all great and very welcome, and the casting was great, but our biggest issue with it was the ridiculous CGI/mocap beast. Using practical effects would have sold the emotional scenes way better.
I mean, how many terrific Chewbacca interactions would have been missed out on if there hadn't been the on-set interplay between the actors? Either way, it proves that hairy beast characters are perfectly manageable with a big tall guy in a suit.
Movie development is already a hugely involved drawn-out process. Arguably it's already too focused on what the audience wants.
And for all the talk about data-driven decisions, it looks to me as if Amazon and Netflix are increasingly shifting to throw a lot of stuff against the wall and see what sticks themselves. Nothing wrong with that necessarily. It's basically how VCs work :-)
Talking about gaming the ratings and user reviews on sites likes IMDB, I surprised by how often it doesn't happen.
The Matrix at this moment has 1,336,956 user votes and 3739 user reviews -- and that's to be expected.
But I regularly come across movies on IMDB that have less than 10 votes and no user reviews at all. Or a single user review that happens to be negative. These are movies less than 10-15 years old and with budgets of at least $1 million.
It's totally puzzling why the director, producers, actors, friends of the cast, or anyone else connected with the movie didn't bother to add a user review. Someone had enough passion to make the movie, spend all that money, work on it for months or years, and they haven't heard of IMDB?
Some of the good material that would have been turned into movies in the past gets turned into television/streaming shows now. Game of Thrones occupies the kind of cultural space that something like Star Wars did during the original trilogy.
It's not that that material doesn't exist, it's simply that it no longer is the sole domain of the movie format.
> Game of Thrones occupies the kind of cultural space that something like Star Wars did during the original trilogy.
I don't know, I don't think the magnitudes match up here.
Game of Thrones is a cool show that people enjoy watching, which happens to be emblematic of the current trend of long-form, character-driven drama with a bug budget.
We're due for another studio crash. Hopefully that will scale back some of the ridiculous budgets on these things and let some new blood break into the scene.
Personally I just go to wikipedia, jump to the "reception" part, and see what rotten tomatoes or metacritic tells about it.
People tell me I should not trust critics, but I really don't want to waste 2 hours of my time. Generally critics are accurate, and RT offers an audience rating too to give some contrast.
I fear the conclusion here does not stand the test of reality either, sadly, as many quality films have gone overlooked by audiences despite fantastic word of mouth and reviews. Is big part of it the terrible taste of the audience? I'm sure. Is there a new trend of the same audience to spend less on cinema? Yes, but it may not be due to the low quality output (hasn't stopped them before). I think television—including Netflix, Hulu, etc.—is the culprit. There is just so much quality television being produced, that people don't want to leave the house. Much more convenient, cheaper, etc. Let's hope this quality television brushes on the taste of the audience and it demands similar rise in quality from films.
I often wonder if movies will simply occupy a niche market in the future. I wonder that about a lot of industries. Appealing to huge demographics with excellent movies would certainly be more profitable, but what if the current status quo of rehashing comic books over and over again is profitable enough? That's certainly a safer bet.
Monster truck rallies cater to a small subset of society, and they're probably not going anywhere. Nobody wonders why the monster truck rally industry doesn't try to expand its audience; they do what they do and it's profitable enough to keep them going. Why change what works?
Capitalism is like evolution. You don't have to be excellent to survive, you just have to be good enough not to die.
I suspect that the division between "movies" and "television" will start to dissapear. As television continues to shift from TV to online video on demand, it will face less and less pressure to divide itself into 22 or 44 minute episodes. Further, the notion of paying for add free shows online appears to be tenable. We are also seeing Netflix release entire seasons at once.
Thing is, the ratings are irrelevant. Someone is paying to see these movies, else executives wouldn't approving them to be made. It's all about money, and brainless, rehashed, sequel nonsense makes tons of it. You want someone to blame? Blame the public. It's not Rotten Tomatoes or the Movie Industry. The latter is giving everyone exactly what they want.
In response to below.
The Mummy made $403,814,493 with a 16% !!
Poor turnouts at the theater are due entirely to home streaming services. People don't want to leave their houses to go sit with a bunch of strangers anymore. It doesn't have anything to do with garbage movies. There has always been tons of crap in the theaters.
I thought The Mummy was pretty good. I mean, it didn't change my life, but as an action/adventure type I liked it as much as the typical superhero or whatever movie.
I would go to see movie, if there would movie that I would be interested to see. Crickets,nothing, just sameness I have already seen hundreds times or comics/star wars or other old franchise I never cared about.
Recently I've seen Wind River, mother!, limehouse golem, american made, Dunkirk, the big sick, Spiderman, War for the planet of the apes, wonder woman, baby driver.
Logan Lucky looked really good, vanished from theaters before I could see it. Baby Driver was very good. Dunkirk. And those are just the big productions.
Logan Lucky was good. One of those much more care was put into the making of this than had to be sorts of movies. Caught me way off guard at one point, which is rare for that sort of film. Didn't over-explain or signpost everything (see: catching me off guard). Solid flick.
I have seen baby driver, it was ok except large plot holes (especially around his girlfriend and boss behavior which made little sense to me by the end of movie). Dunkirk does not seem my thing, but I will check Logan, thanks.
The last few years have been a kind of mini-golden-age for low- to mid-budget horror, if that's your thing, and especially if you like your horror a little off-kilter. It Follows, The Babadook, The Conjuring (kind of a low-key superhero movie blended with very not-scary horror, in many ways, but well acted, plotted, paced, and put together), Train to Busan, You're Next, The Void. The new Evil Dead. Some others I'm sure I'm forgetting right now. I've heard Girl with all the Gifts and Get Out are excellent, but haven't seen them yet.
There are serious stinkers to avoid (It, Insidious series, many others) of course, so it's a bit of a minefield, but worth the effort if you enjoy that kind of thing.
Baby Driver, made no sense, I have yet to see any reasonable explanation for the drawn out and confusing ending. Did serve as a good subaru commercial though.
The full-sized IMAX screen helped (we have one of the very few here in Indy), but overall I found it to be quite good, particularly once I figured out the interleaving of the stories.
I'm also a sucker for movies that don't have a lot of dialog. Thanks Pixar!
Hollywood just has 2 hours- and in those two hours cant win against the great novel story tellers of our times- tv-series. So they made it rollercoaster rides - filled with sfx and instant soup stories.
Which just is not the value, people now are used too.
The irony is that rick and morty like animated series show- that you can squeeze incredibble stories into the smallest format.
You just have to be willing to risk it.
But hollywoods movies have become to big to whale.
Movie ratings from Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB or another site will always have exceptions where the rating doesn't match one's perception (after watching). But they give something to start with when deciding whether or not to check out a movie or read further about it and/or watch trailers, etc. That "initial push" is what I rely on these sites for - in other words, they help indicate whether a movie is a dud or not.
For me, the Rotten Tomatoes rule of "60%+ approval as fresh" doesn't work quite well. So I rely a bit more on IMDB ratings and the top reviews. If I had to rely only on RT, I'd have missed many movies that I personally enjoyed (sorry, don't remember the names/ratings).
As a rule, I usually avoid anything rated below 5 on IMDB, but I do like checking some movies out for the cast, even if the story, script, direction, editing, etc., are awful. In fact, looking at the cast is one of the ways I look for movies, and I sometimes binge watch one particular actor's movies to catch up with older ones that either weren't super hits or were made at a time when the actor wasn't yet well known. Those are usually so heartwarming to watch and get the breadth and depth of the actor's capabilities and also see how they have grown or changed over time.
There are also differences between how some movie critics, with a lot of knowledge and deep appreciation for certain aspects of movies and movie making, look at and rate a movie vs. how an average person (like me) would. Many people just want to be entertained when they watch a movie or show. There are fewer, in proportion, that have high standards for all aspects of movies. Even many people who claim to be "movie buffs" or write movie reviews on their personal blogs aren't as stringent. The masses need a more balanced view between what's strictly critical and what's strictly sheer entertainment value.
The day the movie industry allows me to legally stream a "just released movie" straight to my 4k tv (or my phone), that day, they will have the same or more revenue as before. Until that happen, i would definitely check the ratings/reviews before spending solid amount of money and time on "going" to the cinema.
I have a nice television, but I still prefer going to a good theater to see movies.
There are a few theater operators that have figured out that just showing the movie and selling expensive popcorn isn't good enough. They have to have comfortable seats, decent food, great drinks, rules against talking and using phones, and reserved seating. When the experience is good, I'll pay to see movies I already know well. For example, I just went to see the original Blade Runner two weekends ago.
It's a little like how I can watch baseball on TV, but every year I still love to go to the ballpark to watch live. There's more to it than just the thing you are ostensibly there to see.
So I agree with you. They should have same day streaming. For people that like going to the cinema, they will still go.
I also think that on your way out the theater, they should have DVDs and BluRays of the movie you just saw for sale.
Power lanes? It will never work! The best time to sell someone a product is months after their initial exposure when they have forgotten completely about it. /s
I'm not sure I would do the same. Going to the theater isn't such a limitation for me. My holdup is that movies are very rarely good. Even if they were free to my TV I wouldn't watch a lot of blockbusters.
You're right that they should make it easier to consume their content but they should also try making something watchable first.
The movie industry never want that. If you go to a movie theater with your friends, everyone has to buy their own ticket. However, if you can share a movie, a lot of people can split the cost of a single viewing.
The industry is not monolithic. The THEATERS don’t want that, and there are certainly some directors who don’t, but there are plenty of others who would be fine with it.
Having Netflix and Amazon but movies to distribute directly day one may help. They’re offering things to theaters but theaters want to hold the line.
Part of this includes giving all my favorite series to JJ Abrams to turn into charmless, box ticked, nostalgia milked, super polished hollow 'visual experiences'. The grit, the charm, the lovable clumsy parts, and most of all originality are all missing.
The issue with movies is that they are constrained to a 2 hour window. There is only so much character development, nuancing and world building you can do in such a short time frame.
TV shows have hours upon hours to build up their story.
Another thing that bugs me is that directors keep reusing the same big shot actors, many of whom are not worth their price tag in my opinion. Acting isn't rocket science. With enough practice, any graduate from an acting school could do well. Why not try new blood more often? It would drive production costs down and add variety to casts. Straying away from the usual body models wouldn't hurt either. After seeing Tom Cruise lookalike #4, I would gladly welcome anything but a #5.
RT isn't killing the movie industry, but bad predictors or review engines are certainly not helping consumers. If any website ever shows you some kind of function(eg average) of the general population's perspective, and you are using it to determine if will like it or not, it will probably be wrong.
Just as there is no 'average human', there is no average movie. A movie which is universally panned by most people may be adored by some. Ratings can only make sense within an egocentric data model.
I tried to read this on my phone twice and was twice thwarted with full screen ads I could not close. I am grateful for the title that may tell me all I need to know.
Well, looks like there is a price trying to save cash by trying to make a sequel to everything (so you don't have to re-create characters, some sets, audiences...)
Perhaps the movie industry is to blame for releasing tons of garbage movies and rehashing tired ideas. They pour a lot of effort into blockbusters and then many decent movies fall under the radar, often to be discovered through, oddly enough, RT or IMDB, or word of mouth.
Meanwhile, shows on Netflix and HBO are very popular, quite good, and manage to have good RT ratings.
I don't know what the complaints are about. I have observed that RT has constantly over-inflated rating for movies while they are still playing in the theaters.
Are you confused RT with IMDb by any chance? IMDb do have inflated rating for new-ish movies, but I don't think RT has the same issue (if you are looking at critic rating a.k.a. freshness, not the user rating)
Do you have a better example? Because there's no guarantee that The Big Lebowski or Gladiator or The Wolf of Wall Street should be better than Wind River.
Well, you are right, even if some movie that I or you like more scores lower than another doesn't mean anything.
My original claim was movie rating changes dramatically during the lifetime of the movie, i.e. while in theaters and after, which I don't have any data to prove is, so if I am allowed I would like to retract the original claim.
It is $14-$19.50 to see a movie where I live (probably closer to $30-40 after popcorn), I am not going to take a chance with my money on a middling movie when I can just pirate an HD copy in a month now. I will take a chance with my time however.
Everything is being made for international audiences now. Everything has to try and be one of the 30 movies a year let into the Chinese market. Plots and messages are dumbed down the lowest denominator now. I can't wait to see what movies are like now that Disney is using face scanning technology on audiences... It is a horrible time for art.
It's funny a guy working for a Print medium being linked via digital has any grounding to talking about what is killing what. Bro, you're re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Film is changing at the pace of technology, and Rotten Tomatoes will have its time and then the next generation will go elsewhere.
You know, because IMDB and its comment section totally killed the movie industry. Wait, scratch that. It didn't. It turned into a cesspool and life moved on. Or, as Dr. Malcom might put it, "life, uh, finds a way."
I don't even go to RT now that Google puts a critic rating from there or elsewhere up when I Google a title.
See what's airing, google them all, if they get high marks read what they're about, if there's 3 or more films that are good and I want to see, go and see them in a day
But even a cursory look at recent Rotten Tomato ratings shows a tenuous relationship between the site’s ratings and actual box office. It has assigned a rotten rating to movies that have done well (The Hitmans’ Bodyguard, The Emoji Movie), and it affixes an overwhelmingly positive rating to a film that fared poorly (Logan Lucky).
It seems to me that people are a lot harsher on movies now, less willing or able to suspend disbelief [1]. I see scathing assessments of sequels, but with examples of the imagined problems being problems that have reasonably close equivalents in their predecessors which no one had a problem with when those were released.
Here's a concrete example: probably the most commonly cited 'problem' I hear about Prometheus is that near the end of the movie the heroine "tried to run away from a wheel in a straight line", and therefore it is a bad movie. The general criticism I take from this is not that she took the reasonable general action (running away) but the specific course she took (running in a straight line so the wheel just followed, and not noticing it was following).
The thing is, I think that both the main previous movies in the series, Alien and Aliens, have comparable incidents which no one complains about.
In Alien, near the end of the movie when she was the sole remaining survivor, we had Ripley delaying her escape in the shuttle in order to scuttle the ship - an entirely pointless action. If her plan of escape in the shuttle had worked, it wouldn't matter whether the alien were still alive. What did she think it would do, learn how to fly the Nostromo and pursue her? Scuttling the ship both increased her risk of dying at the alien's hands (it could have easily snuck up on her when she was engrossed in the scuttling procedure), and also nearly caught her in the explosion.
In Aliens, we had Ripley delaying her escape with Newt from the processing plant in order to exterminate the room full of eggs which posed no immediate threat to her (especially those still in the egg sac). Further to this, she did not bother to spend even one bullet or grenade on the queen herself. Ripley expended virtually all of her ammunition on this task, not reserving any to cover her retreat, and she apparently did not bother packing a spare magazine despite being given the resources of a fully-stocked armoury when she was preparing to go get Newt. If she had not exterminated the eggs (pointless, given the impending explosion) the queen would not have had reason to personally follow her and cause all the subsequent grief. Needless to say, those problems could also have been averted by simply shooting the queen along with or instead of the eggs. Again, no one complains about this.
Note that I am not complaining about the above aspects of Alien or Aliens. I love both those movies, and think the examples I gave above are nit-picking. The thing is, I think the criticism of Prometheus is also nit-picking, and directly comparable.
My tentative hypothesis for this recent nit-picking is that, unlike the earlier movies which were from a pre-internet era, it is easy for people to congregate in online communities to pick apart inconsistencies in movies they were personally disappointed in, and then anyone who looks at discussions of a movie they just saw will read all of this stuff they might have otherwise just overlooked. Further to the particular example I chose above, lots of people were disappointed with Prometheus particularly because it was not what they wanted: another formulaic Alien or Aliens movie, so that gave them extra incentive to pick it apart.
Suspension of disbelief only works when the world presented is believable and the story interesting. I find myself able to suspend belief on Nolan films, for example, because of their engrossing story and style.
With your example of Prometheus, no, the flick is not bad because of that scene, but the scene is an indication of the overall laziness of the plot. All the nit-picking, as you put it, is because there is nothing else to hold on to, which is not true of Alien at least (I don't particularly like Aliens).
The thing is, most of the criticisms of Prometheus that I have read cite that scene as a reason for its purported badness, which is why I drew comparisons to scenes in movies that are widely regarded as good, and pointed out that those scenes are not criticized.
Prometheus lacks charm, whereas Alien/s both have it in spades. Think about the group scenes in either Alien or Aliens - I can probably reel off a few classic lines from the banter right now. Does the same go for Prometheus? No - it just doesn't have the originality or charm.
For example, marvel civil war is a false positive (for me). When I watch it, I can't get past the clipped, contrived dialogue, close-ups on faces, ham-fisted plots, inconceivably stupid action, schizophrenic scene changes, plastic cgi, and awkward obviously demographically targeted identity fantasies.
But the movie Valerian and the city of a thousand planets, which was panned on RT, was in almost every way actually objectively worse than its well rated marvel counterpart. It was so bad it made me fill physically ill.
Through accumulated experience, I've found that RT, for me, is a reasonable predictor of "a very bad time." And even if its high ratings don't consistently predict a good time, they do predict relative enjoyability well.
I've had so many awful movie going experiences over the last twenty years of adulthood that I've more or less stopped going. I have a very hard time blaming a rating system. I'd look instead to very shallow, implausible scripting (punchy one-liners, hollow melodrama), lackluster cinematography (zoomed in facials, schizophrenic shot switching), repetitive and/or assinine plots (corporations are eeevil), weird editing and incoherent writing (random, poorly interjected side stories or comedy, bizarre scene shifts, prolonged melodrama), boring, implausible, drawn out action (ugh), predictable demographically targeted identity fantasies, and I don't know, the list goes on.
I know beyond certainty that I'm not the target audience, but I can't help but think people are increasingly demanding movies that repay rather than punish sustained attention, and I can't help but think that these qualities passively improve the commercial value of the Hollywood product.
Edit: grammar, removed repetition.