Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from houstuffworks
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm
Speaker 1: your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with house
Speaker 1: Stuff Works, and iHeartRadio and I love all things tech.
Speaker 1: And today we're gonna get a little rotten. I would
Speaker 1: like to talk to you about a website that means
Speaker 1: a lot to me, Rotten Tomatoes. Now as I sit
Speaker 1: down to record this episode, that site is in the
Speaker 1: news and for those who aren't familiar with the website,
Speaker 1: Rotten Tomatoes is a site dedicated to film and television.
Speaker 1: It hosts entertainment news and previews, but it's best known
Speaker 1: as an aggregator for movie reviews. Lots of folks, including myself,
Speaker 1: use the site to get a quick feel for the
Speaker 1: quality of a film. Movies have the fresh designation, those
Speaker 1: would be interesting and entertaining films, things that you would
Speaker 1: probably want to see. Then you have movies that have
Speaker 1: the rotten designation. They might still be entertaining, but not
Speaker 1: necessarily in the way the creators had intended it to
Speaker 1: be anyway. In February twenty nineteen, Rotten Tomatoes made some
Speaker 1: headlines because some people were abusing the site's features in
Speaker 1: order to give an early negative review to the film
Speaker 1: Captain Marvel weeks before it was meant to come out.
Speaker 1: When groups of people coordinate this effort, it's called a
Speaker 1: review bomb, and it's usually meant to send a message
Speaker 1: or negatively affect a particular film or TV show or
Speaker 1: video games commercial performance, regardless of the actual quality of
Speaker 1: the media itself. In response, Rotten Tomatoes has adjusted how
Speaker 1: they do things. More on that a bit later, but
Speaker 1: I thought it was time to dive into the history
Speaker 1: of the site. Where did it come from and what
Speaker 1: do those ratings actually mean? The Rotten Tomato story starts
Speaker 1: way back in nineteen ninety eight. Yep, the site is
Speaker 1: more than twenty years old, and it was the brainchild
Speaker 1: of a guy named Sen Duang, a creative design director,
Speaker 1: and he worked for a web design company called Design
Speaker 1: Reactor in San Francisco, California. Besides being a web designer,
Speaker 1: Dwang was a big action film fan. He loved watching
Speaker 1: movies starring icons of the genre like Arnold Schwarzenegger or
Speaker 1: Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis, but he was also a
Speaker 1: really big fan of Asian stars like Jet Lee and
Speaker 1: Jackie Chan, who at that time had not yet managed
Speaker 1: to get much mainstream attention in the States. Then in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six, Jackie Chan's film Rumble in the Bronx
Speaker 1: got a US release. That's a phenomenal film, by the way,
Speaker 1: if you have not seen it, highly recommended. I certify
Speaker 1: that one. Fresh awareness of Jackie Chan was on the rise,
Speaker 1: and Duang was curious about how American audiences at large
Speaker 1: would feel about the film, so he found himself checking
Speaker 1: reviews and box office results for the movie. He also
Speaker 1: became a big fan of Ciskel and Ebert and their
Speaker 1: movie review show at the Movies Now for those youngsters
Speaker 1: out there, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were two famous
Speaker 1: film critics who worked at different newspapers in Chicago, and
Speaker 1: they hosted a few different television shows over the years
Speaker 1: in which they would discuss and review films, and they
Speaker 1: were famous for giving a movie either a thumb's up
Speaker 1: recommendation or a thumbs down. Skipet Dewong decided he wanted
Speaker 1: to create a website dedicated to film reviews, and he
Speaker 1: originally thought about naming it Thumbs Up, but before long
Speaker 1: he changed his mind. Which was likely a good idea
Speaker 1: due to intellectual property reasons. He instead decided to see
Speaker 1: if rotten tomatoes was available, and it was, so he
Speaker 1: went with that. Now. According to an oral history of
Speaker 1: rotten Tomatoes, which is hosted on the rotten Tomatoes blog
Speaker 1: at the rotten Tomatoes site, a film inspired Dwang to
Speaker 1: use that name. And I quote, the name rotten tomatoes
Speaker 1: came to send while watching the fantasy film Leolo, about
Speaker 1: a boy who imagines himself to be the offspring of
Speaker 1: an Italian peasant and a giant tomato end quote. And
Speaker 1: maybe that's right. I mean, I'm sure the story came
Speaker 1: from Dwang himself, but it seems to me far more
Speaker 1: likely that the name rotten tomatoes is really just a
Speaker 1: reference to the old trope of an agitated audience hurling
Speaker 1: rotten vegetables a performers up on stage. Why anyone would
Speaker 1: bring rotten tomatoes in the first place is beyond me.
Speaker 1: Perhaps they were just hoping for a bad performance, or
Speaker 1: maybe it was just a way to deal with food waste,
Speaker 1: or maybe it was just a trope that never had
Speaker 1: any real basis in reality. Anyway, to me, it just
Speaker 1: seems far more likely that the name was inspired by
Speaker 1: that idea instead of a fantasy film. And in fact,
Speaker 1: if you visit the Rotten Tomatoes site today and you
Speaker 1: look at how they aggregate their scores, you would see
Speaker 1: that they also reference this particular idea. Anyway, whatever the
Speaker 1: inspiration really was for the name, Dwang launched the site
Speaker 1: on August eighteenth, nineteen ninety eight. Now, the earliest snapshot
Speaker 1: I could find on the Internet archive was for November
Speaker 1: twenty eighth, nineteen nine. The layout at that time was
Speaker 1: pretty simple. Down the middle of the page were news
Speaker 1: items about upcoming and newly released films. Down the left side,
Speaker 1: or along the left rail, as you might say in
Speaker 1: web design, you would find films that were recently released,
Speaker 1: either in theaters or on home video. They were grouped together,
Speaker 1: and you would get the ones that were from that week,
Speaker 1: the previous week, and then two weeks and then three
Speaker 1: weeks before. A small red dot would designate a title
Speaker 1: as having the fresh rating the overall positive review score.
Speaker 1: The right rail had upcoming films listed both for cinemas
Speaker 1: and for home theater, and would also include trailers for
Speaker 1: upcoming films. On the bottom right rail was a breakdown
Speaker 1: of the top ten films by box office in the
Speaker 1: United States. And I know what you're all thinking. You're thinking, Jonathan,
Speaker 1: you looked at the Rotten Tomatoes website for November twenty eight,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine. What was the top performing film that week? Well,
Speaker 1: that would be The World Is Not Enough at James
Speaker 1: Bond film. The number ten film that week was being
Speaker 1: John Malkovich. And I would argue the film number ten
Speaker 1: was superior to film number one, but that's just my
Speaker 1: own opinion. Now. From the beginning, the Tomato meter was
Speaker 1: an important tool. This is the rating that tells visitors
Speaker 1: if a movie has been deemed good or bad, or
Speaker 1: fresh versus rotten, though the percentage wasn't regularly shown against
Speaker 1: movie titles until a little bit later. So how does
Speaker 1: this formula actually work? Is a film that scores ninety
Speaker 1: percent twice as good as a film that scores forty
Speaker 1: five percent? Are the films that have the dubious distinction
Speaker 1: of a zero percent score truly the worst movies ever made? Well,
Speaker 1: According to the founders, the formula for the Tomato Meter
Speaker 1: has remained pretty much constant since the site started. It's
Speaker 1: based on the percentage of positive reviews any given film,
Speaker 1: or these days a television show will receive. So if
Speaker 1: you have one hundred critics and half of those critics
Speaker 1: give a film a positive review and the other half
Speaker 1: trash the movie, the Tomato Meter score should be fifty percent.
Speaker 1: But it gets a bit more nuanced when you take
Speaker 1: a closer look, which we will do after this short break.
Speaker 1: So how does the Tomato meter really work? Well, the
Speaker 1: type of positive review doesn't really matter when factoring the
Speaker 1: Tomato Meters score. If as a critic you use some
Speaker 1: sort of five star system and you give a film
Speaker 1: three stars, you're essentially saying the movie is unremarkable. It's
Speaker 1: not terrible, but it's not great either. It's more good
Speaker 1: than bad, but maybe not overwhelmingly so. However, in the end,
Speaker 1: that counts as a positive review in the Tomato Meter
Speaker 1: standing it's either fresh or rotten. There are no degrees
Speaker 1: of freshness within a single review. It's only collectively that
Speaker 1: you look at them. So if you see a movie
Speaker 1: and you give it a ten, and I see a
Speaker 1: movie and I give it a seven, both of those
Speaker 1: are considered positives. It doesn't matter that one is greater
Speaker 1: than the other. So using this formula, it's actually possible
Speaker 1: for an average film that isn't particularly interesting or entertaining
Speaker 1: to receive a one hundred percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Speaker 1: This doesn't mean that the film is a paragon of cinema. Instead,
Speaker 1: it means none of the critics that Rotten Tomatoes relies
Speaker 1: upon the film a bad review. They might have all
Speaker 1: just said, eh, it's okay. But if they all said that,
Speaker 1: if every single critic said eh, it's okay, that still
Speaker 1: counts as a one hundred percent fresh score. Likewise, if
Speaker 1: more critics said this movie tried hard but ultimately failed,
Speaker 1: it might end up with a zero percent score. That
Speaker 1: doesn't mean it could go toe to toe with a
Speaker 1: movie like Plan nine from Outer Space or some other
Speaker 1: famously awful film to take the title of worst movie. Ever.
Speaker 1: The percentage only tells you about the critical consensus surrounding
Speaker 1: the film, not whether or not the response was overwhelmingly
Speaker 1: positive or mediocre or overwhelmingly negative. You just don't know
Speaker 1: without reading the actual reviews. You could have a case
Speaker 1: where there are two films that are both more or
Speaker 1: less the same quality, however you would define that term.
Speaker 1: But one of those two movies had more critics say Eh,
Speaker 1: it was all right, and the other one had more
Speaker 1: critics say this isn't worth your time. And the Tomato
Speaker 1: meter score might have you think that movie A, which
Speaker 1: gets say, a seventy percent score, is somehow twice as
Speaker 1: good as movie B, which has a thirty five percent score.
Speaker 1: But if you sat and watched both movies, you might
Speaker 1: walk away saying they were both pretty unremarkable. They weren't terrible,
Speaker 1: but they weren't great either. That's the limitation of the
Speaker 1: Tomato meter formula. It's meant to give you a quick
Speaker 1: critical snapshot of a movie, not a detailed diagnosis of
Speaker 1: the film's actual quality. So a thirty percent film is
Speaker 1: not necessarily worse than a forty five percent. You have
Speaker 1: to look at the details. I should add that Rotten
Speaker 1: Tomatoes doesn't use every single movie review site or blog
Speaker 1: as a resource. The site has criteria to select critics
Speaker 1: and their reviews to factor into the Tomato Meter ratings.
Speaker 1: The site also designates certain reviewers as top critics, people
Speaker 1: who have a built up history of film reviews and
Speaker 1: have received wide publication. There are also options for reviewers
Speaker 1: to upload their work directly into the Tomato Meter, they
Speaker 1: can give their films a score, perhaps a score out
Speaker 1: of ten, or even a letter grade like in school,
Speaker 1: like an AB or C or so on. To get
Speaker 1: a Tomatometer rating, a film or television show must receive
Speaker 1: at least five reviews. If at least sixty percent of
Speaker 1: the reviews are positive, the reviewed content is considered fresh.
Speaker 1: If the Tomato Meter is at fifty nine percent or lower,
Speaker 1: then the respective media is rotten. In addition, if a
Speaker 1: film has at least five reviews from top critics and
Speaker 1: at least forty reviews if it's a film that's in
Speaker 1: limited release, or eighty reviews. If it's a film in
Speaker 1: wide release, and it has a Tomato Meter score of
Speaker 1: seventy five percent or higher, it is certified fresh, or
Speaker 1: at least it qualifies for that designation. In actuality, a
Speaker 1: team of Rotten Tomatoes staffers have to look at those
Speaker 1: reviews and determine the likelihood that the movie or television
Speaker 1: show is going to remain at or above seventy five
Speaker 1: percent approval, And if they come to that conclusion that
Speaker 1: the title is pretty safe, that it's got a solid standing,
Speaker 1: it gets the certified fresh rating. Rotten Tomatoes added the
Speaker 1: certified Fresh designation around two thousand and three, So I'm
Speaker 1: getting a little ahead of myself here, but I figured
Speaker 1: it just made more sense to group all the formula
Speaker 1: stuff together. In addition to the critics scores, Rotten Tomatoes
Speaker 1: also calculates an audience score based off user submitted ratings.
Speaker 1: More on that a bit later, as it's related to
Speaker 1: the problem that Rotten Tomatoes recently had to address now.
Speaker 1: According to Dwong, he promoted his brand new site by
Speaker 1: going on to Usenet groups and sharing the link there,
Speaker 1: and he managed to attract one hundred whole visitors that
Speaker 1: first day. Not long after the first day, Yahoo promoted
Speaker 1: the site as site of the Day, and as someone
Speaker 1: who has had work promoted on Yahoo back in the day,
Speaker 1: this was a big deal. It boosted his visitor account considerably.
Speaker 1: Then the site was covered by USA Today and Netscape
Speaker 1: featured it on a landing page, and that really pushed
Speaker 1: the numbers. Roger Ebert himself mentioned the site, and then
Speaker 1: it really was off to the races. Duang at the
Speaker 1: time was still working at Design Reactor, but he was
Speaker 1: finding it exhausting to do his job during the day
Speaker 1: and then work on Rotten Tomatoes every night, so he
Speaker 1: made a really big Leapes cided to quit his steady
Speaker 1: gig and concentrate full time on running the site. He
Speaker 1: also hired on two of his friends in nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: nine to help him. One became the editor in chief
Speaker 1: for the site and another became the marketing director at
Speaker 1: least initially, and their headquarters was Dwang's apartment. Now at
Speaker 1: this point, he had moved from San Francisco back to Sacramento, California,
Speaker 1: where rent was a little cheaper. Meanwhile, back at Design Reactor,
Speaker 1: Stephen Wong and Patrick Lee were interested in their former
Speaker 1: colleague's work, so they reached out to Duong and suggested
Speaker 1: that they actually join forces again and merge Rotten Tomatoes
Speaker 1: into Design Reactor directly and take up a new headquarters
Speaker 1: in Emeryville, California. And Dwang agreed, so they collectively hired
Speaker 1: on an outside company to do some design work for
Speaker 1: the site so that they weren't doing all of that
Speaker 1: work themselves. Stephen Wong started to head up efforts to
Speaker 1: in corporate dynamic elements in the site design so that
Speaker 1: it wasn't just a static web page every time someone
Speaker 1: visited it. For those of you who don't remember the web.
Speaker 1: In the old web one point zero days, that was
Speaker 1: pretty common. You would go to a website and it
Speaker 1: was like a magazine page. There was no expectation that
Speaker 1: the content was going to change day to day. This
Speaker 1: was an effort to move more to a web two
Speaker 1: point oh philosophy, where you have these dynamic elements that
Speaker 1: can change over time and give reason for people to
Speaker 1: come back to a site again and again. The new
Speaker 1: design also supported something that the old site had lacked,
Speaker 1: ad space. Until that happened, there was really no revenue
Speaker 1: model for the website. There's no way to make money now.
Speaker 1: One thing the team had to deal with was the
Speaker 1: reaction from fans once the site began to feature advertising
Speaker 1: on it. Lots of people didn't like the site redesign,
Speaker 1: and they really hated that ads were starting to appear
Speaker 1: on the web pages. I've experienced this myself, and it
Speaker 1: is a bit tricky. After all, unless there is a
Speaker 1: way to make money from my work, I can't really
Speaker 1: devote time to that work because I still have to
Speaker 1: pay bills and stuff, and the alternatives to advertising tend
Speaker 1: to be ones that people don't like very much. Like
Speaker 1: putting your stuff up behind a paywall. These days, a
Speaker 1: related model in which fans directly support the creators of
Speaker 1: the stuff they love has emerged, and some people can
Speaker 1: make a living off of that through platforms like Patreon.
Speaker 1: But that model doesn't work for everyone, particularly a full
Speaker 1: blown company that needs to have a more predictable revenue stream.
Speaker 1: Patrick Lee structured the company and he began to seek
Speaker 1: out investment capital. He also took it upon himself to
Speaker 1: respond to people who were mad about the advertising that
Speaker 1: was appearing on the site. He said he found most
Speaker 1: people were much more reasonable once a human being reached
Speaker 1: out to them to acknowledge their concerns and complaints, and
Speaker 1: that it helped smooth things over. He said, people who
Speaker 1: had been flaming you earlier on with terrible language would
Speaker 1: apologize to you and then have a logical and calm conversation.
Speaker 1: They just need to know that a human being was
Speaker 1: actually there to listen. Now, this was back in the
Speaker 1: pre dot com crash days, and at that time lots
Speaker 1: of investors were eager to get in on the action.
Speaker 1: Rotten Tomatoes didn't have much trouble securing investments. Patrick Lee's
Speaker 1: initial efforts raised a million dollars in funding. At this point,
Speaker 1: the Rotten Tomatoes staff numbered about twenty people. A couple
Speaker 1: of months later, it was up to twenty five people,
Speaker 1: and the site was doing well. By January two thousand,
Speaker 1: it was receiving a quarter of a million unique visitors
Speaker 1: per day. But he hired Lily Chi to serve as
Speaker 1: the chief financial officer, and then the bottom fell out.
Speaker 1: By the bottom falling out, I don't mean that the
Speaker 1: CFO caused any problems. What I mean is the dot
Speaker 1: com crash happened. Now. I've done episodes of tech stuff
Speaker 1: about this era and about the dot com crash, and
Speaker 1: I go into it in great detail, but obviously I
Speaker 1: don't want to do that here. I'll give a quick
Speaker 1: overview in just a moment. So what was the dot
Speaker 1: com crash? Cliffs notes. This was when the dot com industry,
Speaker 1: the Internet market suffered a massive market crash, and there
Speaker 1: were a lot of reasons for that market crash. It's
Speaker 1: a complicated subject. One of those reasons was that you
Speaker 1: had a lot of investors pouring millions of dollars, in
Speaker 1: some cases hundreds of millions of dollars into various startup
Speaker 1: Internet companies in a sort of virtual gold rush. Everyone
Speaker 1: was trying to stake a claim on the incredible potential
Speaker 1: of the Internet. No one was really sure how it
Speaker 1: was going to pay off, but everyone was convinced it
Speaker 1: would pay off. However, many of those companies had no
Speaker 1: means of generating revenue. Some of them had no business
Speaker 1: plan at all, just an idea. Others had a business plan,
Speaker 1: but they grew so fast, and they poured so much
Speaker 1: money into stuff like cool office space, that they spread
Speaker 1: themselves way too thin, way too quickly, and they encountered trouble.
Speaker 1: Investors began to lose confidence. People began to pull their
Speaker 1: money out of the market, and companies were disappearing left
Speaker 1: and right. And it wasn't just the investment money that
Speaker 1: was slowing down. Ad revenue became scarce as well. Advertisers
Speaker 1: pulled back from the Internet. Now they weren't sure if
Speaker 1: the money they were spending would be a sound investment.
Speaker 1: If a website were to go out of business, then
Speaker 1: no one would see your advertising. That would just be
Speaker 1: money thrown away. Rotten Tomatoes was affected like many other companies.
Speaker 1: The twenty five staff members got reduced down to eight
Speaker 1: and then down again to seven, and even those seven
Speaker 1: people saw their salaries go down by a third and
Speaker 1: then later on another cut, so that they were essentially
Speaker 1: making half of what they started with. Patrick Lee would
Speaker 1: reduce his own salary to nothing at all, as did
Speaker 1: Paul Lee, who at that point was the director of marketing,
Speaker 1: and Patrick Lee tried to keep the business afloat. His
Speaker 1: goal was to ride out the storm and to return
Speaker 1: to profitability in order to provide investors a return on
Speaker 1: their investment. He was determined not to fail the people
Speaker 1: who had provided the company with funding, and according to Lee,
Speaker 1: he even at one point decided to move into the
Speaker 1: Rotten Tomatoes office because his biggest expense every month was rent,
Speaker 1: so why not cut out the rent and just move
Speaker 1: into the company offices. He used a club that was
Speaker 1: in the same building and used their shower facilities, and
Speaker 1: he was known as being something of a neat freak,
Speaker 1: so he figured it wouldn't be that big a deal,
Speaker 1: just another interesting footnote in the Rotten Tomatoes history. Well,
Speaker 1: the company was actually able to survive because largely of
Speaker 1: its investors. The funding round that raised one million dollars
Speaker 1: had closed just a couple of months before the market crash,
Speaker 1: so the timing was about as good as it possibly
Speaker 1: could be. With the crash right around the corner. The
Speaker 1: company was flush with cash. Rotten Tomatoes had a little
Speaker 1: bit of a safety net in the form of that money,
Speaker 1: and the investors didn't compounding at the company's doors or
Speaker 1: demand changes in how the company was operating, and just
Speaker 1: let them go about their business, which really helped them
Speaker 1: as well. The team was convinced that online was going
Speaker 1: to be the future for movie reviews, that more and
Speaker 1: more people were going to use the internet to look
Speaker 1: up review scores, they were going to transition from relying
Speaker 1: on things like the newspaper, and besides, Run Tomatoes would
Speaker 1: include links out to full reviews, giving moviegoers the option
Speaker 1: to read numerous critical analyzes of different films in the theaters,
Speaker 1: all from a centralized location. Everyone was sure the market
Speaker 1: would eventually come around. The company just had to be
Speaker 1: able to survive until that actually happened. The small team
Speaker 1: tried to keep things light as the office was dealing
Speaker 1: with the stress of operating under these difficult circumstances. They
Speaker 1: would play video games. They held different parties. Their Halloween
Speaker 1: party was apparently something of a famous annual event, and
Speaker 1: there were a lot of stories about how most of
Speaker 1: the team was pretty awful at showing up in the morning.
Speaker 1: Most people would filter in at eleven am or even noon.
Speaker 1: They even tried to create a financial incentive for people
Speaker 1: to show up on time to take regular business hours.
Speaker 1: They instituted the Pig, a piggy bank that people would
Speaker 1: have to contribute to whenever they showed up after ten am.
Speaker 1: At the end of each month, the money in the
Speaker 1: pig would pay for a company meal, and apparently they
Speaker 1: had some pretty nice meals because people still didn't find
Speaker 1: a way to come in during normal office hours, though
Speaker 1: they would stay long enough to get all their work done.
Speaker 1: It wasn't that they were shirking their duties, they just
Speaker 1: weren't in the office at normal hours. The two thousand
Speaker 1: crash had a long lasting effect. Even in two thousand
Speaker 1: and three, which is when Patrick Lee temporarily moved into
Speaker 1: the office, the company was still in a precarious position.
Speaker 1: Revenues had not been growing super fast, and the coffers
Speaker 1: were reduced a bit. The investment money was down to
Speaker 1: around half of what it had been. But these seven
Speaker 1: people on the team still believed in what they were doing,
Speaker 1: and their work was having an impact on the entertainment industry.
Speaker 1: Even though Rotten Tomatoes is an aggregator, not a company
Speaker 1: that does its own movie reviews, it was seen as
Speaker 1: a huge marketing boost if a film had a high
Speaker 1: Tomato Meter score. Films that hit one hundred percent and
Speaker 1: stayed there for a while could find some pretty good
Speaker 1: box office performance, and films that had lower scores would
Speaker 1: see fewer ticket sales. So filmmakers started to develop a
Speaker 1: sort of love hate relationship with the company, and then
Speaker 1: another company would come knocking. This company was IGN Entertainment, which,
Speaker 1: as the name suggests, was an entertainment website that was
Speaker 1: founded back in nineteen ninety six and it was mostly
Speaker 1: known for video game coverage. IGN issued a press release
Speaker 1: on June twenty ninth, two thousand and four, to announce
Speaker 1: the plan to acquire Rotten Tomatoes for a rumored ten
Speaker 1: million dollars, though the amount was never formally announced. If so,
Speaker 1: that ten million dollars represented a nice payoff for the
Speaker 1: one million dollar investment that had been made back in
Speaker 1: two thousand. The team that had stuck by the site
Speaker 1: even as things were rough were vindicated Patrick Lee later
Speaker 1: said that the team had probably accepted an amount that
Speaker 1: was too low, but considering how hard they had worked
Speaker 1: and how challenging it was to generate revenue, they felt
Speaker 1: it was the best choice at the time. Several of
Speaker 1: the core team members would leave the company over the
Speaker 1: course of the following year. Patrick Lee and Stephen Wong
Speaker 1: left in August two thousand and four to create a
Speaker 1: new site called Alive Not Dead. Several former Rotten Tomatoes
Speaker 1: employees would later go to join them. Lily Chi left
Speaker 1: in two thousand and five to become CFO of Lithium Technologies,
Speaker 1: which had an office space in the same building as
Speaker 1: the Emeryville Rotten Tomatoes office. Sin Duang, the founder, stuck
Speaker 1: with Rotten Tomatoes a little longer, leaving in two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven. He went on to found a couple of
Speaker 1: other companies like moviesw butter dot com it's a movie
Speaker 1: news site where you can follow films in various stages
Speaker 1: of development, and wopular, a news aggregation site. Really big
Speaker 1: on the aggregating there. But our story doesn't end here.
Speaker 1: We've got a bit more to tell to get up
Speaker 1: to present day. And this is a story I can
Speaker 1: really sympathize with IGN Entertainment takes the reins at Rotten
Speaker 1: Tomatoes in the summer of two thousand and four, and
Speaker 1: then stuff changes pretty quickly. Over just a few years,
Speaker 1: IGN would introduce new features to the site, including a
Speaker 1: forum in which members could discuss films and reviews. They
Speaker 1: could talk about films within their own communities, so you
Speaker 1: could go to specific location based parts of the forum,
Speaker 1: and it made the site much more interactive than before.
Speaker 1: That's another element of that Web two point zero philosophy.
Speaker 1: Since its introduction, the site had had several redesigns, and
Speaker 1: that continued as well. Over time, the site consolidated information
Speaker 1: about the film's box office standing, the total amount of
Speaker 1: money it had earned since its release, and how long
Speaker 1: it had been in theaters, and of course it's tomatometer's score.
Speaker 1: All of that got kind of consolidated into a single view.
Speaker 1: All right, now, it's time to talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about some corporate maneuvers, and trust me, as someone who
Speaker 1: has been through the process of acquisitions numerous times, these
Speaker 1: things can matter a lot. In two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: news Core, Rupert Murdoch's media company, purchased IGN Entertainment. So
Speaker 1: at that point Rotten Tomatoes had a new corporate overlord.
Speaker 1: This would be just the beginning of some pretty massive changes,
Speaker 1: and I imagine each time it happened there was another
Speaker 1: cultural shift within the company. This always happens with mergers
Speaker 1: and acquisitions. But as I said, it was just the beginning.
Speaker 1: More after this short break, we're going to flash forward
Speaker 1: now to twenty ten. So the site's been operating under
Speaker 1: news Corp. And IGN since two thousand and five. Twenty ten,
Speaker 1: the social networking site Flickster, which catered to movie fans,
Speaker 1: would swoop in and offer to buy Rotten Tomatoes from
Speaker 1: IGN and news Core was looking to refocus on the
Speaker 1: video game industry, and so the two sides reached an
Speaker 1: undisclosed agreement and Flickxter became the new parent company for
Speaker 1: Rotten Tomatoes. We're still not done yet, though, So Rotten
Speaker 1: Tomatoes goes from independent website to part of IGN Entertainment,
Speaker 1: to being under Newscorep, to now being under Flixter. Just
Speaker 1: a year later, in twenty eleven, Warner Brothers Home Entertainment
Speaker 1: Group announced it would acquire Flickxter, and Rotten Tomatoes would
Speaker 1: go along. For the ride. The financial details of this
Speaker 1: acquisition were also undisclosed. However, contemporary reports valued Flixster at
Speaker 1: between sixty million and ninety million dollars, So now Rotten
Speaker 1: Tomatoes has a new new overlord. The acquisition raised some
Speaker 1: eyebrows in the online journalism community. It seemed a pretty
Speaker 1: strong candidate for a conflict of interest because Warner Brothers
Speaker 1: makes films and television programs owning a site for hosting
Speaker 1: reviews that the company would need to tread carefully to
Speaker 1: avoid charges that it was fixing the game, and honestly,
Speaker 1: it seemed like stuff was on the up and up.
Speaker 1: This became pretty darn clear when Batman Versus Superman Dawn
Speaker 1: of Justice came out. The film did not get a
Speaker 1: very good score. Currently, the score is at twenty seven percent,
Speaker 1: meaning it is designated as being well and truly rotten.
Speaker 1: Though again, remember that just means the number of negative reviews.
Speaker 1: It doesn't tell you how negative those reviews were. Some
Speaker 1: DC fans got angry at Rotten Tomatoes and petitioned to
Speaker 1: have it shut down, though I don't know who in
Speaker 1: the world would have done that. Here's the thing, Batman
Speaker 1: Versus Superman was a Warner Brothers Pictures film. At the
Speaker 1: time of its release, Rotten Tomatoes was still owned in
Speaker 1: part by Warner Brothers Entertainment, so clearly there wasn't some
Speaker 1: sort of shell game going on here. Not to mention
Speaker 1: that Rotten Tomatoes is an aggregator. While the site uses
Speaker 1: its formula to determine if a film is fresh or rotten,
Speaker 1: it doesn't actually review the films itself. It's not the
Speaker 1: site's fault if movie critics don't like a film, and
Speaker 1: likewise it's not the site's credit if critics love a film,
Speaker 1: but angry fans didn't care very much about the facts.
Speaker 1: They wanted the films they liked to get good reviews,
Speaker 1: even if those films weren't, you know, good, and this
Speaker 1: wouldn't be the last time that fans and Rotten Tomatoes
Speaker 1: would clash. Lots of foreshadowing in this episode. Also Brett Ratner,
Speaker 1: the filmmaker and one of the financiers behind Batman Versus Superman,
Speaker 1: criticize Rotten Tomatoes, calling it quote the worst thing that
Speaker 1: we have in today's movie culture. End quote. Now, I
Speaker 1: would argue there are far worse things in movie culture,
Speaker 1: like the rampant cases of sexual harassment. But hey, Brett Rattner. However,
Speaker 1: his real point is one I actually agree with, and
Speaker 1: that was that the Rotten Tomatoes score was being misused.
Speaker 1: It was being used as a measure of overall film quality,
Speaker 1: and as I've already said on this episode, that's not
Speaker 1: really accurate. So while I do not agree with mister
Speaker 1: Rattner that Rotten Tomatoes is the worst thing in Hollywood,
Speaker 1: I do agree that a lot of people rely on
Speaker 1: Rotten Tomatoes without fully understanding it. It really just tells
Speaker 1: you if more critics thought a film was good, or
Speaker 1: if they thought it was bad, not the relative goodness
Speaker 1: or badness of it. Now, maybe that's splitting hairs, but
Speaker 1: I think it's an important designation. Not long after the
Speaker 1: Batman Versus Superman debacle, Rotten Tomatoes changed hands yet again.
Speaker 1: The ticketing company Fandango acquired Flickster and Rotten Tomatoes, with
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers receiving a thirty percent stake in Fandango. The
Speaker 1: other seventy percent of the company belongs to Fandango's parent company,
Speaker 1: NBC Universal Media, which in turn is owned by Comcast.
Speaker 1: Once again, a media company owns Rotten Tomatoes. Now, like
Speaker 1: I said at the top of this episode. Recently, there
Speaker 1: was another audience brew haha that brought Rotten Tomatoes back
Speaker 1: into the news. This time it was about Captain Marvel
Speaker 1: and a review bombing campaign and a seemingly weird interpretation
Speaker 1: of what the film's star Brie Larson had said about
Speaker 1: press tours that she was going on. Larson had said
Speaker 1: she had noticed her press tours had her meeting with
Speaker 1: journalists who were nearly always white men, so she wanted
Speaker 1: to make sure her press tours had a greater diversity
Speaker 1: represented at them. Now, some people interpreted this to mean
Speaker 1: she did not want white men at her press tours,
Speaker 1: but Larson herself dismissed that. She said she wasn't arguing
Speaker 1: that people should be taken off the tour that she
Speaker 1: would not meet with certain journalists because they happened to
Speaker 1: be white men. Instead, she said more people needed to
Speaker 1: be added into the tour so that there was greater representation.
Speaker 1: She wanted to see greater diversity, but not at the
Speaker 1: cost of those who are already there. However, some fans
Speaker 1: took this to mean brite Larson hates white men, and
Speaker 1: I'm a white man, so I hate Captain Marvel even
Speaker 1: though the movie isn't out yet, and then the review
Speaker 1: bombing began. Rotten Tomatoes has now decided that users will
Speaker 1: not be able to post comments on films that aren't
Speaker 1: out yet. And you might think, well, that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Why were they doing it before, And it's because Rotten
Speaker 1: Tomatoes was allowing for anticipation scores, this idea of how
Speaker 1: anticipated is this film or people looking forward to seeing it,
Speaker 1: but it's been misused. According to the official blog quote,
Speaker 1: we are disabling the comment function prior to a movie's
Speaker 1: release date. Unfortunately, we have seen an uptick in non
Speaker 1: constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling, which we believe is
Speaker 1: a disservice to our general readership. We have decided that
Speaker 1: turning off this feature for now is the best course
Speaker 1: of action. End quote. Personally, I think this is a
Speaker 1: good move. I think it's unfair to judge any film
Speaker 1: before you've actually seen it. Call me crazy that way. Now,
Speaker 1: it may turn out that Captain Marvel is an absolute
Speaker 1: stinker of a movie and it deserves bad reviews, but
Speaker 1: we should at least watch the film first before we
Speaker 1: come to that conclusion and maybe have a better reason
Speaker 1: for disliking the movie than misinterpreting deliberately or otherwise an
Speaker 1: actor's comment about press tours. There are other examples of
Speaker 1: people misusing Rotten Tomatoes in various ways, and it's not
Speaker 1: always a method of review bombing a movie to give
Speaker 1: it a negative review. There's also an example of potential
Speaker 1: review bombing to try and improve a film's score. There
Speaker 1: was the famous case of the film Gottie starring John Travolta,
Speaker 1: a movie that had near universal critical negative reviews, but
Speaker 1: a group of positive reviews hitting suspiciously close together suggested
Speaker 1: that there might have been a concentrated, coordinated campaign to
Speaker 1: change the score with people who had been either involved
Speaker 1: with the movie or connected to the movie in some way,
Speaker 1: or perhaps even paid off mafia style by the film, which,
Speaker 1: if you're asking me, gets a little meta with the
Speaker 1: subject matter, and then I kind of respect, but it's
Speaker 1: still gaming the system. So it's good to see that
Speaker 1: Rotten Tomatoes is responding to that in this way. Other
Speaker 1: big changes may be following soon, and by the time
Speaker 1: you hear this, they may even be in place. There's
Speaker 1: a rumor that pretty soon, if you wish to leave
Speaker 1: a movie review as a user, you will have to
Speaker 1: first authenticate that you purchased a ticket to that movie,
Speaker 1: presumably through Fandango. I don't know if you'll be able
Speaker 1: to leave a review if you bought your ticket through
Speaker 1: some other service, but you have to prove that you've
Speaker 1: actually seen the film, or at least bought a ticket
Speaker 1: to the film. And honestly, if people buy tickets to movies,
Speaker 1: that's what the executives really care about. It's nice if
Speaker 1: people like your movie. If you're an executive, it means
Speaker 1: that more people might go and see the film. But ultimately,
Speaker 1: the ticket sales are what matters. If I have footed
Speaker 1: the bill for a movie to be made, I'm going
Speaker 1: to be happy if a lot of people go and
Speaker 1: buy tickets to that film. Well, that wraps up this
Speaker 1: episode about Rotten Tomatoes and its history, as well as
Speaker 1: how the tomato meter works. I hope you guys have
Speaker 1: a greater understanding of what Rotten Tomatoes is and how
Speaker 1: it impacts the industry. It actually tends to have a
Speaker 1: pretty big impact these days, to the point where you
Speaker 1: hear some movie executives really complain about how a score
Speaker 1: can dramatically affect the performance of a film. Personally, I
Speaker 1: think film quality dramatically impacts the performance, but I could
Speaker 1: see how a really bad or really good score could
Speaker 1: sway an audience. I've certainly skipped movies because of the
Speaker 1: low scores. If you guys have suggestions for future topics
Speaker 1: of tech stuff, hey, why not let me know about them.
Speaker 1: One way you can do so is to write me.
Speaker 1: The address for the show is tech stuff at how
Speaker 1: stuffworks dot com, or you can pop on over to
Speaker 1: our website that's tech Stuff podcast dot com. That's where
Speaker 1: you're gonna find links to our social media presence where
Speaker 1: we present things on social media. You will also find
Speaker 1: a link to our merchandise store. Remember, every purchase you
Speaker 1: make goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it.
Speaker 1: And I will talk to you again really soon. For
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks
Speaker 1: dot com.