One review aggregator out there is claiming that audiences love Lightyear. None of the others agree. Can you figure out which one it might be?
Part of the problem with understanding the film industry is the issue of clouded data. One such site that constantly comes up in regards to information that may feel “off” is Rotten Tomatoes. Once heralded for being a pro-consumer website that allowed audiences and critics to met out scores for movies and shows, the site underwent changes after a series of movies were reviewed less-than-stellar. First it was Ghostbusters 2016, then it was The Last Jedi, and finally Captain Marvel. For each of the three movies listed, the audience scores for the films were deemed “problematic.” In some cases, people went so far as to claim that “Russian bots” were posting reviews for the films. Seriously:
The news that Russian bots may have been involved in amplifying the negative reaction to Star Wars: The Last Jedi was part of a research study published earlier this month by Morten Bay, but in addition to the bots piling on the existing general backlash aimed at the film and director Rian Johnson, it seems that the criticism also included the anger that was focused on Kelly Marie Tran and her role in the film.
Now I’m not here to defend the Russians, and maybe they have the time to spam movie websites with bad reviews, but we’re years passed The Last Jedi and the big wigs are still out there trying to defend it. I don’t think it took the commies to make people turn away from Rian Johnson’s opus.
Still, the outcome was what you might expect. Rotten Tomatoes on multiple occasions has worked to “fix” their audience score system. Basically, anything that is deemed to be “review bombing” or “trolling” will have a hard time making it through to the site. While those terms sound bad, the issue becomes that sometimes people just genuinely don’t like a movie that the corporations have hundreds of millions of dollars invested into. When that happens, it’s awfully easy for a company like Rotten Tomatoes, one that depends on those same corporations, to label genuine negative reviews as “trolling.” Surely everyone must love what the corporations and the mass media love, right?
Want some evidence of these things occurring?
Rotten Tomatoes Hides the Eternals During Poor Reception
The problem here is that Rotten Tomatoes does not exist in a vacuum. It faces competition. We have other sites that provide audience scores in almost the identical way, sometimes even in a superior way. Normally, the audience scores for the big three aggregators line up remarkably well. Rotten Tomatoes, Meta Critic, and IMDB all usually have numbers that match closely. But sometimes, especially when a big movie with poor reception launches, one of these sites is not like the other. Let’s take a look, for example, at the audience scores for Lightyear… a movie which has grossed less-than-half what it was expected to make just two weeks ago:
That’s IMDB with an audience score of 5.3 — in other words, very mediocre.
And here is Metacritic’s audience score, which is within 1.0 of the other’s record.
Okay, so from those two sites we can see that sample size doesn’t seem to budge the needle. They have different systems for measuring audience scores, one using 114 user reviews from select persons, the other using many thousands of random reviews. It all comes out to the same mediocre level. And with Metacritic we even get a breakdown of how polarizing the movie is — 58 negative reviews, 48 positive, and only 8 moderate.
So how does Rotten Tomatoes see it?
It’s funny how a film that is coming in as Pixar’s worst miss from original projections is just hunky-dory with audiences, eh? The public loves it more than critics according to only one review aggregator out there. It’s just another example of the same old thing we’ve been tracking with Rotten Tomatoes for years now.
Where this gets interesting though is that you’ll often read access and mainstream media pieces that use Rotten Tomatoes to pretend they just can’t figure out what is going on. Audiences love this movie! Why is nobody showing up? It must just be those darned dinosaurs being so popular. But in reality, they know about Metacritic, they know about IMDB, they just don’t want to say it. Because an 86% audience score keeps up the narrative we’re all supposed to believe. It’s just too bad for them it doesn’t line up with reality. And as long as there are sites such as thing, people will find out how the entertainment corporations may be manipulating the way we see movies.
For all the latest news that should be fun, keep reading That Park Place. As always, drop a comment down below and let me know your thoughts. We really do read them… and sometimes respond!
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Updated 5:20 PM EST, 6/20/22 — Resolved a typo (thank you again, Texas Android)
