> To account for this influx of reviewers, Rotten Tomatoes has created a "Top Critic" designation reserved for established media outlets, such as The New York Times and The Atlantic. However, this label has no special bearing on a film's top-line Tomatometer score and is largely incorporated into ancillary aspects of the site.
Just last night, I noticed that I could access the two percentage scores for critic reviews.
If you go to "https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_dilemma", and click on the critic reviews percentage (25%), you get a popup that lets you select between seeing the All Critics score (25%) and Top Critics score (28%).
(And if I'd thought to check Rotten Tomatoes first, when selecting what looked like a fun light comedy on Netflix, I wouldn't have wasted an hour of my life before I said WTF, checked RT, and continued to be in a bad mood.)
Incidentally, I'd love to have the Tomatometer score integrated into my UI for video streaming services. The services seem to instead like to use their own very generous scoring instead. (When they show any score at all. Some like to suppress the ratings for new shows they produced, presumably to avoid shooting down their own poor shows before people watch them by default.) But Rotten Tomatoes is a much better predictor of how I'll like a show than the streaming service scores are. But maybe the streaming services don't want to expose that the majority of the movies and series offered at any time now range from mediocre to outright bad.
>> But maybe the streaming services don't want to expose that the majority of the movies and series offered at any time now range from mediocre to outright bad.
There is no "now" necessary in that sentence.
All media production in all eras is mostly terrible. Music wasn't better in the 80s, or 70s, or 60s, its just that the 80s music you hear today is heavily curated to the good stuff.
It seems like streaming has made it worse, but only because you're watching so much more. In the past movies took effort to watch. You went to the cinema, or video shop. By the time they made it to TV they were curated, or at the very least you knew about them.
There was plenty of dross that made it direct to video that never made it to cinema or TV. (In 1989 I lived for a year at a place with no broadcast TV. We watched 2 videos a night from the local blockbuster-type store. They had a LOT of very crap movies.
To blame streamers for delivering a lot of mediocre content is to miss the root cause. Most new content is mediocre. Or bad. It has always been the way. Streaming just makes it easier to watch.
You guys are opening yourself to manipulation. Why not just be open for surprises? That’s what I do. Most of the time it’s bad surprises, but the occasional masterpiece that everyone else seems to hate make up for it. I do seem to not have the same taste as most people writing reviews though. I almost always find other people’s opinions ludicrous.
Power to you, but you probably miss out on masterpieces in the other direction though. The ones you would be more likely to watch if you spent more time watching those 'conventionally' liked movies, given the limit of time.
I appreciate the sentiment, but time in life is limited. Streaming is 95% slop so it really does pay to let others curate you the best films, with tolerance for a lower rating if it's a genre you particularly like.
Just last night, I noticed that I could access the two percentage scores for critic reviews.
If you go to "https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_dilemma", and click on the critic reviews percentage (25%), you get a popup that lets you select between seeing the All Critics score (25%) and Top Critics score (28%).
(And if I'd thought to check Rotten Tomatoes first, when selecting what looked like a fun light comedy on Netflix, I wouldn't have wasted an hour of my life before I said WTF, checked RT, and continued to be in a bad mood.)
Incidentally, I'd love to have the Tomatometer score integrated into my UI for video streaming services. The services seem to instead like to use their own very generous scoring instead. (When they show any score at all. Some like to suppress the ratings for new shows they produced, presumably to avoid shooting down their own poor shows before people watch them by default.) But Rotten Tomatoes is a much better predictor of how I'll like a show than the streaming service scores are. But maybe the streaming services don't want to expose that the majority of the movies and series offered at any time now range from mediocre to outright bad.