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Once again, the Pop Cult-captured entertainment establishment is admitting what they vehemently denied up till now.
In 2018, a movie-publicity company called Bunker 15 took on a new project: Ophelia, a feminist retelling of Hamlet starring Daisy Ridley. Critics who had seen early screenings had published 13 reviews, seven of them negative, which translated to a score of 46 percent on the all-important aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes — a disappointing outcome for a film with prestige aspirations and no domestic distributor.
Quick aside: Note that the non-Brand X projects these Disney mercenaries get are often shoestring vanity projects like the above.
In October of that year, an employee of the company emailed a prospective reviewer about Ophelia: “It’s a Sundance film and the feeling is that it’s been treated a bit harshly by some critics (I’m sure sky-high expectations were the culprit) so the teams involved feel like it would benefit from more input from different critics.”
“More input from different critics” is not very subtle code, and the prospective critic wrote back to ask what would happen if he hated the film. The Bunker 15 employee replied that of course journalists are free to write whatever they like but that “super nice ones (and there are more critics like this than I expected)” often agreed not to publish bad reviews on their usual websites but to instead quarantine them on “a smaller blog that RT never sees. I think it’s a very cool thing to do.” If done right, the trick would help ensure that Rotten Tomatoes logged positive reviews but not negative ones.
Between October 2018 and January 2019, Rotten Tomatoes added eight reviews to Ophelia’s score. Seven were favorable, and most came from critics who have reviewed at least one other Bunker 15 movie. The writer of a negative review says that Bunker 15 lobbied them to change it; if the critic wanted to “give it a (barely) overall positive then I do know the editors at Rotten Tomatoes and can get it switched,” a Bunker 15 employee wrote. I also discovered another negative review of Ophelia from this period that was not counted by Rotten Tomatoes, by a writer whose positive reviews of other Bunker 15 films have been recorded by the aggregator. Ophelia climbed the Tomatometer to 62 percent, flipping from rotten to “fresh.” The next month, the distributor IFC Films announced that it had acquired Ophelia for release in the U.S.
Before diving into the analysis, let me point out how poorly written the Vulture article is. The choppy flow; the turgid prose – it’s obvious at a glance that the writer’s main purpose is looking clever instead of being clear.
He could use a good editor.
The Ophelia affair is a useful microcosm for understanding how Rotten Tomatoes, which turned 25 in August, has come to function. The site was conceived in the early days of the web as a Hot or Not for movies. Now, it can make or break them — with implications for how films are perceived, released, marketed, and possibly even green-lit. The Tomatometer may be the most important metric in entertainment, yet it’s also erratic, reductive, and easily hacked.
Time for the obligatory “Hey, remember when audiences accused Disney of gaming RT to inflate The Last Jedi’s critic score, and Pop Cultists called it a wild conspiracy theory?”
“The studios didn’t invent Rotten Tomatoes, and most of them don’t like it,” says the filmmaker Paul Schrader. “But the system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don’t go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do.”
Hollywood’s trademark lack of self-awareness and contempt for its audience on full display.
That article is the holy grail of Death Cult Boomer kvetching.
… Rotten Tomatoes — with help from Yelp, Goodreads, and countless other review aggregators — has desensitized us to the opinions of individual critics. Once upon a time, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert turned the no-budget documentary Hoop Dreams into a phenomenon using only their thumbs. But critical power like that has been replaced by the collective voice of the masses. A third of U.S. adults say they check Rotten Tomatoes before going to the multiplex, and while movie ads used to tout the blurbage of Jeffrey Lyons and Peter Travers, now they’re more likely to boast that a film has been “Certified Fresh.”
“You dumb cattle are too lowbrow to read Roger Ebert’s column, so now we must abase ourselves gaming a review site to make you consume our agitprop!”
Rotten Tomatoes allows users to rate movies alongside critics, and three years after the Fandango deal, it changed the way these “audience scores” were calculated. Misogynist trolls had hijacked the platform, coordinating to tank women-led movies like Captain Marvel before they opened. As a fix, for users’ reviews to count, they would need to verify that they bought tickets — which they could do most easily by purchasing them via Fandango. Under the new rules, audience scores for tentpole movies have often gotten an early lift since most of the first-weekend crowds are diehards who buy tickets in advance. (In June, ads for The Flash bragged about an audience score of 95 percent — “as of 6/14/23,” which was the Wednesday that showtimes began in international markets such as Belgium and Finland but two days before the film’s U.S. release. Today, that score is 83.)
Now that was an impressive display of Olympic-level mental gymnastics.
When fans of these zombie IPs noticed studios were putting their thumbs on the scale, they took to social media to highlight the disparity between RT’s critic and audience scores. So the entertainment media arm of the managerial class trotted out the old smear tactic of labeling them trolls and ascribing their motives to senseless hatred. Which, as is evident in the OP, is pure projection.
But now that the same Hollywood press is admitting that critic and audience scores were both manipulated, the fans they’re vindicating remain “misogynist trolls.”
That’s not even the most glaring instance of doublethink in the original piece.
A bigger change came in 2018 when Rotten Tomatoes loosened the restrictions on whose reviews could be indexed. Once, the site had required its contributors to write for publications with substantial web traffic or print circulations. Now, more freelance and self-publishing critics have been allowed to join along with some who review movies via YouTube or podcasts.
The move has been widely characterized as a response to long-standing complaints over a lack of gender and racial diversity on the site and in criticism at large. A 2017 study found that 82 percent of Rotten Tomatoes’ reviews of the highest-grossing movies of that year had been written by white critics and 78 percent by men. With its more relaxed criteria, Rotten Tomatoes gave the “critical conversation a hard push in the direction of inclusion,” declared the New York Times.
Rotten Tomatoes says that more than 1,000 new critics have become “Tomatometer-approved” since 2018, bringing the site’s total to about 3,500. Of those new members, the company says, 50 percent are women and 24 percent are people of color. (Rotten Tomatoes also says that with individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ or say they have a disability factored in, 66 percent of the new critics come from underrepresented groups.) Every bit helps, of course, and I wouldn’t presume to argue with a company whose whole business is calculating percentages. But I might quibble that adding 500 women and another 500 men, three-quarters of them white, to an already overwhelmingly male and white group of around 2,500 does not seem like it would radically alter the imbalances that precipitated the original criticism.
Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. The hired pen is complaining that pre-internet critics like Roger Ebert no longer have a monopoly on movie reviews. But at the same time, RT erred by not casting a wide enough net to meet a secret quota of critics who aren’t straight, white, Christian males – like Roger Ebert.
Could the allegedly more inclusive Rotten Tomatoes have simply expanded its ranks in hopes that the new critics would be nicer to the IP-driven event movies that Hollywood now mostly depends on? Intentional or not, this appears to be what happened. According to a study by Global News, in 2016, the average Tomatometer score for all wide releases was in the rotten low 50s. By 2021, that average had climbed to a fresh 60 percent.
This story provides more than just vindication for the fans who rightly saw they were being psyoped by Hollywood.
It shows how – by their own words – the cultists in charge of news and entertainment media have lost the use of reason.
Their alien morality has no foundation but the elites’ arbitrary dictates. That’s why you get weird paradoxes like film makers being portrayed as oily grifters and put-upon victims, sometimes in the same paragraph.
It’s also why an article billed as exposing corruption ends up praising it.
That’s what DIE initiatives boil down to. It doesn’t get much more corrupt than authorities disregarding qualifications to grant benefits based on unjust criteria.
No wonder the Death Cultists are blind to their own evil.
Anyway, take the win for now.
And never forget how much the pimps of pop culture hate you.
Learn how to eject them from your life here:
Audiences aren’t dumber than they used to be. They’re actually something more dangerous now. They’re apathetic. They no longer go to movies to be elevated, thrilled, or surprised; audiences go to movies to “spend an outing with the family” or have something to talk about with co-workers/peers. It’s like pretending to pick up smoking in order to have a smoke break. The entire industry has become rote routine, and everyone knows it.
There is a very good reason the entire industry (as well as journalists like the above) will be replaced by AI. There isn’t anything they’re offering that can’t be easily replicated by a machine.
The machines’ sole remaining flaw, from the regime’s perspective, is the extreme time, effort, and difficulty involved in keeping them from sometimes telling the truth.
That’s a scary thought that the modern audience has become apathetic. The smoking habit example hits the nail on the head.
It does beg the question, how to we as creatives manage to fight that apathy? It’s easy enough to say “tell a good story” (like saying pull up your bootstraps, sonny) but if your audience is running on mental fumes after the long decades of nonstop movie dopamine hits, how could you hope they’d be receptive to anything better?
This is what NewPub, indie filmmakers, and alternative industry creators are currently grappling with and have been for some time.
Back when current creators grew up (any time before the 2000s), adventure, wonder, and brand new experiences, were what all audiences wanted. You were expected to make something cool, something wild, and something out of left field. This is the energy that fuels all of today’s burgeoning creative industries.
The issue is that the mainstream has trained audiences to desire brand and safe product at the expense of anything new or exciting, even when they clearly don’t want it. It’s like that old line: they were taught wrong, as a joke.
So right now we’re dealing with a perception problem brought on by how demoralized and betrayed the mass audience has become from an industry that hates them. I’m not sure how that can be defeated aside from keeping up the fight and prayer.
Until there is some sort of large outside force teaming up with these new industries, all we can do is create.
The mistake most indie creators make is assuming we’re still operating in a free market where customers vote with their wallets and the best idea wins. That hasn’t been true in some time, as the inability to point out a single example of a woke company going broke proves.
Where we are is in a command economy that maintains just enough free market trappings to maintain the illusion of choice. The Death Cult’s reign over Hollywood is more akin to the Bolsheviks’ takeover in Russia or the revolutionaries’ conquest of France.
Which brings up the other important reminder that the successful peasant revolt is historical fiction. Both of the revolutions above were organized and led by academics, lawyers, and/or minor nobles. And only when the prior tyranny had already started to collapse under its own contradictions.
That means our model isn’t Washington crossing the Delaware. Instead, it should be more like a nonviolent IRA model. We build up parallel systems, we keep the flame alive, and we wait for the British Empire – or in this case, the media-entertainment complex – to start cracking up.
Patience obtains all things.
This is a message that needs to be repeated ad nauseum. Too many get impatient and irritable when they perfectly well understand that the current state of things did not happen overnight, and neither will a solution.
In the meantime: create. That is what you were meant to do, so do it. Worry about the rest when there is something that can actually be done about it.
The recent black pilling in newpub circles has been disappointing to see. Yes, the days of megastars are vanishing into the rear view as the gatekeepers lose their power to create artificial scarcity. But it’s still easier now for an industrious author to make a living than when Stephen King or even Brandon Sanderson broke out.
I’ve moved two orders of magnitude more copies than most oldpub authors and earned almost 30x more from my writing alone. One key is to ease away from overreliance on Amazon. That’s where neopatronage comes in.
Look no further than the fact that what would have qualified as mediocrity in past ages now earns nods of surprised approval from most audiences, as if merely being passably entertained rather than browbeaten is more than we expect.
“Mediocrity” might be a harsh way of putting it – “workmanlike” might be a better word for it.
There’s also the problem on our side of twee pabulum being praised to the rafters just because it contains a few clumsy nods to Christianity.
Many times there aren’t even nods to Christianity, but just a vapid “good message” (like “help out your friends” or “hard work pays off”) and some rationales about how it could have been worse. Ex. sure there are no mentions of Christianity and one character even makes a joke about the idea of God being absurd, but it’s just one line. Or sure there are multiple gay couples, but the movie isn’t putting them front and center.
The requests to change views were done as requests are often done in bureaucracy, something presented as “totally voluntary” with an unspoken promise of rewards for those who play ball and punishments for those who do not.
I’ve seen the same thing happen all the time in hiring committees. For example, we once had an administrator tell us we needed to hire a woman (when there were only two women in the pool.) They would always begin by saying that according to fair employment laws we could not use gender to choose candidates, and that we should hire the most qualified, etc. This would then be followed about the “lack of representation” in the job, how nice it would be to have people who take initiative in helping the underrepresented, and so on. This message would be repeated when the desired action was not taken. We ended up not budging, and the implied threat never came, but most people in bureaucracy are too timid to risk it. (Just look at how many people got vaxxed over the mere hint that their jobs might be on the line.)
I don’t doubt that the vast majority of people who got requests about what “super nice” critics do fell into line without complaint.
Note that those are the same tactics employed by the Mafia.
Comparing pressure tactics from HR departments to Mafia extortion might be unfair to the Mafia. The Mafia probably wouldn’t regard the double-think required to pay lip service to fair employment laws while also lobbying for “representation” as a moral imperative.
Mea culpa.