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More changes are coming to review site Rotten Tomatoes. As of Thursday, the audience score for new movies added to the site will default to show ratings from fans confirmed to have purchased tickets to those films.

"The goal is to strengthen consumer confidence around that audience score," said Greg Ferris, vice president of product for Rotten Tomatoes' parent company, Fandango.

The Rotten Tomatoes audience score will now show the rating from verified ticket purchasers as its default. Users can click on the tab marked "all audience" to see the combined score from all audience reviews.
Rotten Tomatoes

Here's how it'll work: Any site user will still be able to write a review of a film. But now users can opt to have their rating and review marked as "verified."

That means they bought their film ticket on Fandango, the movie-ticketing site that owns Rotten Tomatoes. Later this year, AMC Theatres and Regal and Cinemark ticketing sites will also be participating. So if you buy your ticket for Aladdin at the box office, for example, sorry, but you can't get verified for that review. (At least for now: Dana Benson, Fandango vice president for communications, says that the site is "exploring options" for ways to verify box office purchases.)

Reviews associated with a ticket purchase will be marked with a "verified" icon. By default, the verified reviews will be used to make up the audience score shown on Rotten Tomatoes. To see the total audience score, including reviews by those who didn't purchase through Fandango or didn't opt in to the verification, users can select the "all audience" tab.

"Every rating counts, but the score that we're putting out there is verified," Ferris said.

The Rotten Tomatoes site will automatically verify that a ticket was purchased and that the time for that movie showing has already passed. For now, only one verified review will be allowed per transaction, no matter how many tickets were purchased.

The changes will affect only movies opening Thursday and beyond, and won't be retroactively applied to movies already on the site. The fan rating system previously used on Fandango's site will be replaced there with the Rotten Tomatoes score.

The change is similar to an element used on Amazon. Reviews written by those who bought a particular product on that site are marked with the words "Verified Purchase."

Fandango will also display Rotten Tomatoes reviews, complete with the "Verified" indicator when a ticket purchase has been confirmed.

Rotten Tomatoes is perhaps best known for the Tomatometer, which tells readers at a glance whether a film has mostly positive or negative reviews from professional critics. But the audience-score section of each movie page is also prominent.

"Our research shows movie fans leverage both (critic and audience ratings)," Ferris said. The changes are meant to "protect the integrity of the audience score," he added.

The audience-score section of the Captain Marvel movie page made the news back in February. Even before the film was released March 8, users were leaving negative comments about it, with some reacting angrily to public comments made by star Brie Larson.

Larson drew fire in part for telling Marie Claire magazine that the critics covering her films were "overwhelmingly white male" and noting that she was reaching out to a more inclusive group of critics. That resulted in some Rotten Tomatoes users leaving such comments as "Larson has made it clear ... men need not attend this movie."

Back in February, Rotten Tomatoes disabled the comment function prior to a movie's release date and made some other changes.

There's clearly a trend toward using a movie-review site to express anger about a film for reasons other than its content. That may not be the only reason for adding and elevating the verified review component, but it's surely in the mix.

"It's a component that we don't ignore," said Lori Pantel, chief marketing officer for Fandango.

Said Benson, "Anyone who is in this space, who has an open platform, is looking at this."

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"Our research shows movie fans leverage both (critic and audience ratings)," Ferris said.

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Who talks like this?
 

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Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 05-23-2019, 05:52 PM:
 
Ferris.
 

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Posted by Allan Barnes (Member # 5178) on 05-26-2019, 07:33 PM:
 
In this era of FAKE NEWS.. I am "shocked" to hear about FAKE REVIEWS. Imagine a world where people talk about stuff they don't know anything about! (present company excepted of course)
 

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Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 05-27-2019, 02:35 AM:
 
Back in the early days of the web (about 1995 to 1999), I would hold the IMDb rating of a movie in high regards. With a few exceptions, their rating usually closely matched my opinion of a movie.

IMDb was acquired by Amazon somewhere around 1998. Ever since then, I found their ratings to become more divergent from my personal liking.

Obviously, there was an enormous influx on the internet and World Wide Web between back then and now. So you could say that IMDb and those other sites that allow you to review movies, would eventually end up reflecting more of the general opinion of the populace at large, but I doubt that's true anymore. There is so much manipulation going on and there is a big interest at the studios to get those ratings up. Those ratings simply convert into money.

I think that many of those scores are influenced externally. Not just by trolls just voting without even having seen the movie, but simply by bots and hired fake users, to crank up some of those very bad ratings.

If Rotten Tomatoes' new system can beat this kind of abuse, I'm actually all for it.
 

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Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 05-27-2019, 11:48 AM:
 

quote: Allan Barnes

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In this era of FAKE NEWS.. I am "shocked" to hear about FAKE REVIEWS. Imagine a world where people talk about stuff they don't know anything about! (present company excepted of course)

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Have you ever read Amazon reviews? Someone will ask a simple question such as "can this run in reverse?". Amazon then sends emails out to people who have bought the item in the past asking if they can help answer the question. Then we end up with lots of responses "I don't know, I never tried".
 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 05-27-2019, 12:24 PM:
 
Crowd-sourced reviews are often pretty dubious. Trolls are a big problem as well as people (or bots) writing fake reviews to benefit a competitor. Obviously companies like Amazon and Google need to do more to fight the problem. Until they can stop people from trolling or gaming their review systems I'll continue seeing crowd-sourced reviews being virtually worthless. Still, I get pretty annoyed by how a small business can get hurt if some trolls decide to trash the review score on its Google Business Listing.

I welcome Rotten Tomatoes adopting a method to verify that amateur critics have seen a certain movie and prove the review writers are not bots. Still, I'm going to take movie reviews more seriously from a professional critic whose reviews are published in some kind of major newspaper or other publication than I will an average person off the street I don't know. I think a proper movie critic needs to know a great deal about film history and trends of film-making through the decades. An amateur critic may not have that kind of knowledge. And that would affect the quality of reviews.
 

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Posted by Lyle Romer (Member # 1266) on 05-27-2019, 07:16 PM:
 
I agree with Bobby completely. Sometimes if you look at the "star rating" for a local business it is very misleading. Both from deliberate "trashing" by trolls and competitors and then from morons.

I've seen many times in the restaurant reviews where people give a restaurant 1 star because they messed up an order even if they fixed it and/or comped the meal. When I look to go to a restaurant, I want to know if the food is good and if it is a clean place. Recently, I almost didn't go to a Chinese restaurant in West Yellowstone (Red Lotus) due to the star rating. Luckily, I read through and found people giving bad reviews for things like, "you can get the same food cheaper in any city." Well, no shit. When a restaurant is in a middle of nowhere tourist destination the food is going to cost more than at home. The McDonald's down the street was like 2x normal prices.

I decided to eat there after determining most of the poor reviews seemed like BS and it was a clean restaurant, with pleasant atmosphere and above average Chinese Food.

Don't even get me started on product reviews on Amazon (and pretty much all websites). You have to develop psychic powers to figure out which reviews are real, which are paid for, which are by trolls and which are by morons (such as giving 1 star because it was damaged in shipping).
 

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 05-27-2019, 09:00 PM:
 
One time we were in San Francisco and looking for a good steakhouse. I had heard of a place called "Alfred's" so I looked up the reviews. The "featured" review on the Google said it was "horrible, worst meal I've ever had, avoid this dump at all costs, service is worse than the food was," etc. Luckily I read a few more reviews that were all favorable so we decided to try it out. It turned out to be one of the coolest restaurants I've ever been in (in business since the 1920s), and the steak was easily in the top 10 of my lifetime, and the service was top-notch too.
 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 05-28-2019, 10:31 AM:
 
Facebook is another place where anyone is liable to see reviews or comments about a restaurant, movie theater or any other kind of business. I often see such comments not being in touch with reality at all.

Just this weekend in one of the Facebook forums that are focused on my town someone posted the question, "which is the worst restaurant in town?" An avalanche of mostly idiotic answers followed. Some participants came to defense of specific restaurants being trashed by others. Big arguments and insult contests ensued.

I always wonder if the person making the negative comments has some kind of grudge against someone working at that business, or maybe the person has ulterior motives. Maybe he works for a competitor or has friends/family at a competing business. Maybe he's a deadbeat whose credit card got declined there and now he's trying to get some revenge. Who knows? I think more often than not the person doing the complaining just has a giant stick up his ass. I've seen plenty of people behave like dicks toward restaurant staff, getting pissy over the slightest little things. We have a lot of cheapskates in my town. One of my friends is the GM of a local restaurant; he told me it's fairly common for a server to work his/her ass off taking care of a big group of people and then get stiffed for the tip.

 

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Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 05-28-2019, 06:10 PM:
 
Seems like a reasonable idea, especially since they are not preventing reviews from other people. We don't have the feature any longer, but I had to disable user rating for certain movies because of high troll activity. Anything that was highly political would often have a huge slew of max and min ratings. And movies like "Captain Marvel" which trigger some kind of outrage would do the same.
 

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Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 06-06-2019, 02:59 AM:
 
Bobby, reviews on these platforms can also work in the other direction. There is a neighborhood pizza joint just two blocks from my first apartment on Avenue J in Brooklyn -- DeFarras. There was nothing extraordinary about the place; if you know Brooklyn, you know it practically invented great pizza; pizza take-out places in the 80s were as prolific as Starbucks is today, nearly a pizzeria in every neighborhood, with a range from really awful to 5 star. The DeFarra's around the corner from my place made a fair-to-middlin slice, i.e., nothing to write home about and all the kids from the college who lived in my apartment building knew that there were much better pizzerias in Brooklyn (MUCH better), but hey, this was right down the block and since none of us at the time could afford cars, walking trumped quality most of the time.

Thing is, of late, what I can only describe as a hipster cult has grown up around this pizza joint. It had gotten a glowing mention in New Yorker magazine (I think) and from then on, people started to flock to the place like salmon swinging up stream to spawn.

Lots of Brooklyn has become gentrified and so with that comes people aching to be hip and cool and with-it and they seem to have latched on to this pizza place as if the italian gods have come down from Mt Etna and delivered pizza to DeFarra's on Avenue J. AND that popularity allows the old man who runs the place (because he's old, they say he's "authentic") he discovered he can charge $5 a slice (!!) and the hipsters will pay it -- he may be old, but he's no fool, unlike his customers. Because the place is old and decrepit and visibly dirty they say it's "quaint and old-school." Because they make customers wait half and hour to 45min for their burnt slice of pizza, they say he's like the Soup Nazi, so oooh it's like Seinfield -- how freakin hip is THAT?!!

Point is, there are about twenty 5 star reviews from people who have drunk this Kool-Aid to every one who give the place the deserved 1 or 2 star rating -- even 2 stars is to high for a place that failed health inspection MULTIPLE times. Yet if you went by the Yelp reviews, this would be a place to travel miles just to get a taste of what would seems like incredible tasting pizza according to the reviews. Almost to a person these 5 star sheeple claim it's the "best pizza they EVER TASTED." Yah, I guess the rodent droppings are that unique "authentic" ingredient that they just can't get enough of!

Sure Google, Facebook, Amazon and Yelp, et al, can jump thru hoops to try to thwart trolls, but what can you do about the preponderance of imbeciles?
 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 06-06-2019, 01:16 PM:
 
Yeah, I've personally eaten a lot of pizza in New York City, ranging from bad to great. 30 years ago it just seemed like pot luck, especially if I was buying it by the slice from some shop that doubled as a news stand and convenience store. The chances of getting good pizza were better by visiting an actual restaurant or ordering take out from a pizzeria that did very little else but make pizza.

I agree glowing positive reviews on Yelp or elsewhere can be just as suspect as the extreme negative reviews. Yelp is hurting pretty bad over the situation. Yelp's stock price is well down from a peak set a couple or so years ago. So now they're trying to incorporate other features (booking reservations, ordering thru GrubHub, etc) into their web site and mobile apps so they're not so reliant on user reviews. Anyone can find bogus reviews just as easily on Google and Facebook, so Yelp has to come up with more ways to attract visitors otherwise Yelp is going to be finished soon.

I completely get the concept of some local crowd propping up a restaurant as being great when it's really not that good. When I first moved to Lawton, Oklahoma the locals here went on and on about a local Italian restaurant being great. I wasn't impressed with it at all. I didn't think it even measured up to an average Olive Garden location. Some of my friends thought I was insane. I told them they need to visit some larger cities where there is at least some competition in that food genre, or visit NYC where the competition is fierce. Anyway, that local Italian restaurant went out of business several years ago, not long after an Olive Garden location opened across town.

quote: Frank Angel

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Sure Google, Facebook, Amazon and Yelp, et al, can jump thru hoops to try to thwart trolls, but what can you do about the preponderance of imbeciles?

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quote: Bobby Henderson

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Yeah, I've personally eaten a lot of pizza in New York City, ranging from bad to great. 30 years ago it just seemed like pot luck, especially if I was buying it by the slice from some shop that doubled as a news stand and convenience store. The chances of getting good pizza were better by visiting an actual restaurant or ordering take out from a pizzeria that did very little else but make pizza.

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Nowadays it's hip to stand 2 hours in line for some rundown shack on Avenue J in Brooklyn and pay 5 dollars for a tiny slice without extra toppings...

Getting back on topic. In general, it's far easier to spot fake reviews than fake ratings, especially if they're bought in order to make the place look better. Those "paid for" reviews are not going to be as thorough as a more honest review and in most cases, they're so raving about everything, it's almost impossible to believe.
 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 06-07-2019, 12:21 AM:
 

quote: Marcel Birgelen

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Nowadays it's hip to stand 2 hours in line for some rundown shack on Avenue J in Brooklyn and pay 5 dollars for a tiny slice without extra toppings...

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quote: Bobby Henderson

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There's no room for any "run down shacks" on Avenue J in Brooklyn. That wasn't even the case when I lived just off Avenue M during my senior year of college nearly 30 years ago. You would be hard-pressed to find a building any shorter than 3 or 4 stories tall in that neighborhood. If anything, the buildings in that part of Brooklyn have been renovated, all due to the mass gentrification and real estate property speculation that has infected the whole region.

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