![]() As Nash says, “Whenever the box office has a downturn, the studio executives are going to go, ‘Well, it’s not us. The great Rotten Tomatoes terror of 2017 started to seem overblown: Maybe the downturn hadn’t been because the website was big, but because the pictures got small. ![]() Depending on the week and the website, readers could come away with one of two conflicting conclusions: Either Rotten Tomatoes was destroying the industry, or it didn’t matter much at all.īy the end of 2017, box office grosses were down only 2.7 percent year over year, and revenues rebounded to a record high in 2018. Bergquist’s conclusion that Rotten Tomatoes wasn’t responsible for spoiling box office performance echoed around the internet, popping up in articles via Variety, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, Vulture, The AV Club, Quartz, Gizmodo, Polygon, Engadget, IndieWire, Salon, and several other outlets. Yves Bergquist, the founder and director of the Data & Analytics Project at USC’s Entertainment Technology Center, posted a cursory study on Medium that showed little correlation between 2017 Rotten Tomatoes scores and overall box office returns or opening-weekend earnings. Yet a few days after the Times piece was published, a counter-narrative emerged. ![]() That put a scare into studios, and one chief executive of a major movie company told the Times’ Brooks Barnes that he was making it his mission to destroy the site. Because Rotten Tomatoes scores were integrated into the Fandango purchasing process, Carlson continues, “the Rotten Tomatoes number became much more of a pass/fail for people when there were multiple movies that they could make decisions on.” “Rotten Tomatoes scores were being woven into the ticket-buying behavior in new and different ways,” says Ben Carlson, the SVP and general manager of entertainment research at MarketCast. But now it’s much more immediate.” Although Rotten Tomatoes had existed since 1998, its traffic and visibility had increased over time, especially after Comcast’s movie ticketing company Fandango acquired Rotten Tomatoes and its parent site, Flixster, in 2016. “It used to be that your friends would go on Friday, you would chat to them about the movie before you decided to go on Saturday. “The real concern with Rotten Tomatoes was that it became such a go-to place for people and could kill a movie much more quickly than was traditional,” says Bruce Nash, the founder and publisher of movie industry data provider The Numbers. Between June and early September 2017, Wired, the Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, and The New York Times, along with The Ringer, published lengthy reports examining studios’ widespread perception that the review aggregator was tanking attendance. After 2020’s total shutdown, past hand-wringing about box office hazards seems quaint, but three years ago, Hollywood was panicking about Rotten Tomatoes. Those disappointments had something in common: They all received far-from-fresh scores on Rotten Tomatoes, which collects critics’ reviews and presents the percentage of them that the site deems positive or negative. 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Nolan’s Dunkirk, domestic movie revenue reached its lowest point in decades, dragged down by flops like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Baywatch, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, The Mummy, Transformers: The Last Knight, and The Dark Tower. ![]() Despite strong showings from Wonder Woman, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. By the standards of summers when domestic movie theaters were actually open, mid-2017 was a tough time for the movie industry. The last time a Nolan-directed movie hit theaters, in 2017, Hollywood was facing what in pre-pandemic times struck some unsuspecting studio executives as an existential threat. Theaters in some states, including California and New York, remain closed after a nearly six-month moratorium on moviegoing, but thanks to Nolan’s name, Tenet represents a real referendum on most Americans’ willingness to brave the multiplex en masse. Although the late-August debuts of Unhinged and The New Mutants already reinstated the American movie market in forgettable fashion, Nolan’s feature is the first big-budget tentpole to test mid-pandemic demand. On Thursday, Christopher Nolan’s new would-be blockbuster Tenet came out in recently reopened theaters across the United States, following an expectations- surpassing $53 million international launch.
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