Rotten Tomatoes: PR agency paid critics to inflate movie ratings

Vulture newspaper published a report denouncing an unfortunate incident related to the vote collector Rotten tomatoes, a reference point for movie lovers. Basically, there will be a PR agency called Bunker 15 Some critics pushed From the site to Amplify sounds from the movies.

The scoop starts with the movie Ophelia with Daisy Ridley, whose initial critical reviews led to a score of 46. Given the criticism, Bunker 15 would hire some critics considered by Rotten Tomatoes, often independent of major publications, and would pay them a minimum of $50 each to inflate the film’s ratings, This is to increase the average rating of the movie. In the following months, further reviews appeared, all generally positive and all coming from critics who had already reviewed the Bunker 15 films, who gave the film a score of 62.

Keep in mind that Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t do that Arithmetic mean of votes, but only counts whether votes are positive or negative. So, let’s say a movie with five reviews would have a rating of 100, while a movie that had four 9s and one 4 would have a rating of 80.

Note that Rotten Tomatoes’ website guidelines specifically exclude paid reviews from aggregate reviews. But the fact that payments to detractors were made illegally did not allow any control in this regard.

Rotten tomatoes?

Aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes (or Metacritic and Opencritic in the world of video games) have become reference points for those who want to get an idea of ​​opinions about films. Unfortunately, they have had the effect of desensitizing the audience to the knowledge of the individual critic, and focusing on average ratings, to the point that Quentin Tarantino was able to announce that he no longer reads critics, none of whom he knows. Name, considering that reviews now end up getting lost in the piles of aggregators, without being able to appear.