I won't pay full price for movie unless I love the trailer...so I mostly see movies at the cheapo 2nd run theater...which is awesome because its $2 on Tuesdays and free refills on the large popcorn. AKA, at that price, halfassed Hollywood crap is mostly okay.

I was wandering through Rotten Tomatoes the other day looking to see what movies I'll be seeing in about 3-4 months when the arrive at the El Cheapo when I noticed something interesting.

A surprising number of major movies have a LOW score from critics and a HIGH score from the audience. I'm taking a 40 to 60 point difference in opinion. Take a look.

MIB INTERNATIONAL
23% Critics vs. 65% Audiences (42 point shift)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/men_in_black_international

XMEN: DARK PHOENIX
23% Critics vs. 64% Audience (41 point shift)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dark_phoenix

SHAFT
31% Critics vs. 94% Audience (63 point shift)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/shaft_2019

GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS
40% Critics vs. 83% Audience (43 point shift)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/godzilla_king_of_the_monsters_2019

THE INTRUDER
31% Critics vs. 74% Audience (43 point shift)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_intruder_2019

Do you think is business as usual?

Or an unusual disconnect between Critics & Audience?

They changed there rateing system to make sure no movie could get given less then a c rateing from the audience.
I know clown fish tv covered it.

Yeah Rotten Tomatoes is itself thoroughly rotten. They've been caught blatantly manipulating ratings and numbers to the point no one sane trusts the site anymore.

And the rift between critic and viewer is getting worse as more and more critics are just shills now.

Quote from: kosmos1214;1093140They changed there rateing system to make sure no movie could get given less then a c rateing from the audience.
I know clown fish tv covered it.

So the Audience ratings are being inflated?

That would explain the wide disconnect of numbers. My friends who have seen the current summer movies haven't been praising them much (quite the contrary) so I was surprised to see the audience scores.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1093228So the Audience ratings are being inflated?

That would explain the wide disconnect of numbers. My friends who have seen the current summer movies haven't been praising them much (quite the contrary) so I was surprised to see the audience scores.

Yes From memory they now have the score tabulation ignore any thing under 40% if I remember right meaning its pretty much impossible to give a movie less then C to C+ more importantly your review means literally nothing if you aren't actively aware of this.

This all happened over captain marvel VS battle angel Alita because they where desperate to make captain marvel look good.

Most important
[video=youtube;ZnAwWZ8ZWQE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnAwWZ8ZWQE[/youtube]

Greater detail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FjAyHDGnV8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f61xMGJyuAg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XWkO0VRtYI

Between all of thoughts you will get at least some jist of the story watch the others if you want more detail.

Also the channel thoughs are from Clownfish tv  is pretty good on being reasonable fair and covering all the pop culture hoopla And comic books.

Thank you Kosmos. I'm gonna go power barf now.

THAT explains the dicotomy.

Ugh, does that mean we have to "trust" the critics score as more real than the audience?

Just typing that is lame. I'm with Omega on the critics-as-shills factor so they can't be trusted either.

Okay, is there another Audience-Review site online with a modicum of reality?

Even without explicit manipulation, note that audience scores can often be misleading. The people who both go to watch a given movie and then rate it are often not representative of the general public. Many of those movies had disappointing box office returns, some highly disappointing. If only a few people show up, they might be only those people predisposed to like the movie. Audience ratings also tend to be bimodal - people tend to go to the site and rate the movie only if they really liked it or really hated it. If it's just so-so, they just don't rate it - reducing statistics.

Plus, if a site tries to correct for these effects, then they may be labelled as manipulating the scores. On the other hand, they might actually be manipulating the scores to win better favor with studios.

It also has a lot to do with marketing. If the film successfully targets an audience that likes that kind of film, then the audience will be predisposed to like it. On the other hand if a film is marketed as A but is really B, then not will a lot viewers be indifferent or actively hostile toward the genre, but on top of that many will be annoyed by the bait and switch. This also happens when niche films break into the big time, and go from a targeted to a broad audience. For instance, an incomprehensible art film may be loved by critics and students of film for its contributions to the art, but hated by a general audience who want a story and characters they can relate to. Films that fall between or mix genres can be especially hard to target, with mixed results.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1093254Okay, is there another Audience-Review site online with a modicum of reality?

I find the user ratings on IMDB to be far more useful. I generally disregard all the scores of 10 or 1 and see how the majority of people are actually scoring a movie. There is far more information on those pages, including average scores by the users' sex and age. If a movie has good scores but women are giving it an 8.6 while the men my age are only averaging a 6.9, that tells me a lot more than Rotten Tomatoes' average audience rating.

Quote from: Brand55;1093454I find the user ratings on IMDB to be far more useful. I generally disregard all the scores of 10 or 1 and see how the majority of people are actually scoring a movie. There is far more information on those pages, including average scores by the users' sex and age. If a movie has good scores but women are giving it an 8.6 while the men my age are only averaging a 6.9, that tells me a lot more than Rotten Tomatoes' average audience rating.

IMDB has its own problems. Lots of small films that anyone would considered third rate and terrible were released to a surge of great ratings, in the most blatant cases garnering literally thousands of 10/10s and nothing else. What was happening was companies were hiring up botnets and cheap foreign workers to artificially inflate their ratings. For smaller films, this was often the majority of the reviews, and you often had to go back several pages to find comments that weren't boilerplate unvarnished praise. For larger films, it was an attempt to influence early viewers and future voters by front-loading a wave of positive ratings when the movie was first released. While the number of real reviews would eventually overwhelm the fake ones, it would still have a long-term effect, because people are often influenced by seeming consensus, and default to going with the herd. (There are studies that show the very first comment on things like YouTube videos have a statistically significant effect on the final rating, no matter how many ratings it eventually gets.) IMDB basically did nothing to combat this, and it effectively destroyed their rating system. In fact, that's the reason I started using RT more frequently. So it's rather unfortunately that RT has gone down a similar path, though unlike IMDB their degradation is a sin of commission, not of omission.

I still find the comments on IMDB useful, because it's possible to skim and filter out the reviews that are likely paid -- they're usually short, full of general platitudes, and display no knowledge about the film that's not contained in a promotional blurb -- but it takes work. Your practice of avoiding the 10s sounds similar.

Quote from: Pat;1093464I still find the comments on IMDB useful, because it's possible to skim and filter out the reviews that are likely paid -- they're usually short, full of general platitudes, and display no knowledge about the film that's not contained in a promotional blurb -- but it takes work. Your practice of avoiding the 10s sounds similar.

Yeah, that's why I said I disregard the ratings of 10 and 1. In the overwhelming majority of cases, those ratings come from biased sources of some kind. Every ratings system is going to be vulnerable to some kind of exploitation, but at least IMDB gives you a lot more information to work with than RT. It's good to be able to quickly see if most people are giving a movie an 8 or a 6.

So we're back to the pre-web buddy system.

As in, "hey buddy, we like similar movies, what did you think about XYZ?"

Quote from: Spinachcat;1093475So we're back to the pre-web buddy system.

As in, "hey buddy, we like similar movies, what did you think about XYZ?"

Well even long before that critics were occasionally getting heat for being shills for this or that company or skewing their reviews for free movie passes. This probably goes way back to stage plays. Or further.

Gaming, even Board Gaming is rife with this problem as well.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1093475So we're back to the pre-web buddy system.

As in, "hey buddy, we like similar movies, what did you think about XYZ?"

We arn't quite that bad yet I have a system of sorts that rather seems to work but keep in mind I am not a huge movie guy and you may need to adjust this to your habits some.

The first part is to have a few warning sources these need not ever give reviews in and of them selves. This is because the purpose of these sources is more to give advance warning if there's any thing to rotten going on with a given production but not necessarily to tell you if its good or bad (but if they are talking about it it should be taken as a bad sign). Its also worth pointing out these problems are commonly political.
The ones I use are as fallows.

clownfishtv
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4gD0czpXVv_LpADTSU624g/videos
They arn't so much a review channel but a pop culture news channel and they are pretty good and fairly accurate.

weaponized nerd rage
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoYT286QDrUp2hQbDb05FvA/videos
Sort of like like clownfishtv but a little more rage shitty and he dose do reviews from time to time and at times you hear him give some pretty high praise usually as an aside to something else he's talking about.(his reviews are commonly marked I suffer so you don't have to). He also has a pretty good eye for the way movies are put together.

Nobullshit
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZNk7Jjb2t8EuBdgn4Zj1cw/videos
For the most part he's sort of a pop culture political commentary channel I don't watch very much of him but he's worth fallowing as he accurately called both girlbusters and ocians11 and every other movie I've seen him call for that matter.

itsagundamn
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbQ4fbi0fy3d6Hb7q2FIATw
Sort of like nobullshit but covers films much rarer.

The 2nd part is to do some digging and find some independent reviewers that you trust with similar tastes to yours ideally. I'm not a very big movie guy so I don't have much in the way of dedicated reviewers but heres what I recommend.

David Stewart
https://www.youtube.com/user/rpmfidel/videos
not a ton of reviews but very good at picking threw the writing of the thing.

Happy console gamer{/b]
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2vUKoTGIwNYq4LO0YWKPIg
Mostly a game channel but occasionally he dose movie stuff though usually not at the time of release. though he dose work on a film review channel filmfury though I don't watch it normally.

gigguk
https://www.youtube.com/user/gigguk
He's an anime youtuber but I rather trust his opinion even when I disagree with him.


Next lets talk about specific channels and sources to avoid.

#1 is cinamasins and related channels
I know what you are thinking but there so liked well yes but they pretty much deliberately misrepresent movies and contrary to popular bleave they arnt actually doing comedy in there review channels you will hear the exact same issues raised this is especially important because they are commonly wrong.
for greater detail watch this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELEAsGoP-5I&t=

#2 Movie bob aka bob chipman
He's a political ideologue and his views are so tainted by his personal politics that he's pretty much going to deside if a movies good or bad pretty much by weather it offends his politics or not.

#3 Mothersbasment , digibro and padantic romantic
I am lumping all 3 of these guys together because they all suffer from pretty much the same issue Which is a flavor of the same problem as movie bob I list them separately from movie bob because they do anime youtube rather then movie content but they all will touch on movies from time to time at least in the anime space.
Its also worth pointing out there flaws all came to light in the same event the fall out from goblin slayer. In short goblin slayer bad because I'm offended.

Quote from: kosmos1214;1094128#1 is cinamasins and related channels
I know what you are thinking but there so liked well yes but they pretty much deliberately misrepresent movies and contrary to popular bleave they arnt actually doing comedy in there review channels you will hear the exact same issues raised this is especially important because they are commonly wrong.
for greater detail watch this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELEAsGoP-5I&t=

A good alternative (with actual humor) is the Pitch Meeting series over on the Screen Rant channel. I don't usually care for the rest of that channel's offerings, but the PM series is really good and tends to be pretty accurate while still being short and funny.

As an example, here's the video for Dark Phoenix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0s9mUXhHZ8