Hollywood Reportedly Hiring Directors Based on Their Rotten Tomatoes Score

Rotten Tomatoes has been a significant go-to website for cinephiles when it comes to new releases. It’s come to the point where a Rotten Tomatoes score can make or break some films at the box-office. There’s an inordinate amount of people who now decide whether to watch a film in theatres purely based on a film’s RT score.

A THR report is making some waves, it alleges that studio heads are hiring directors based on their Rotten Tomatoes track record — this is meant to make them take notes on a director’s credibility. A rep, who spoke to THR under anonymity, added that RT scores of a director’s past movies are the first and primary thing producers look at when directors are pitched to them:

Critical acclaim is now gamified. The Rotten Tomatoes score is the first thing people look at when I go pitch a director. It inevitably affects decision-making around hiring a director. When you hire a director, all you have is their past work and a meeting.

Here’s the problem. There have been many instances where audience scores differ, quite vastly, from the Rotten Tomatoes score. Isn’t it illogical for a studio head to use RT as a deciding factor if critical and audience reception don’t match? Maybe, they also look at the audience score, which they absolutely should.

In a way, this is why I still cover RT scores, because it’s become such an important part of the industry as a whole. It’s an aggregate many are interested in. However, a better indicator of quality would probably be Metacritic, which tends to count the scores of 60 or so film critics, from national publications, and not some schmo joe blogger who hasn’t yet seen “Citizen Kane.”

A few years back, Martin Scorsese criticized RT for “devaluing” cinema, and he wasn’t alone. His former screenwriting partner Paul Schrader was interviewed in a Vulture piece and slammed Rotten Tomatoes as a symptom of a bigger problem:

The studios didn’t invent Rotten Tomatoes, and most of them don’t like it. 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.

Schrader also criticized the way RT judges what is a fresh and rotten review:

If a review straddles positive and negative, too bad. I read some reviews of my own films where the writer might say that he doesn’t think that I pull something off, but, boy, is it interesting in the way that I don’t pull it off. To me, that’s a good review, but it would count as negative on Rotten Tomatoes.

Director Brett Ratner once called the aggregator “the destruction of our business.”

Rotten Tomatoes narrowing movies down to a binary good/bad is definitely helpful for the general audience, and to keep track of what films are getting good notices, but it also stops people from actually reading reviews. Instead of finding a critic they trust, a lot of people see a rotten rating and think the movie isn't worth their time. This has no doubt played a part in the degradation of the “film critic”.

Tarantino recently gave his two cents on modern-day film criticism which he believes now has no identity, and that has kept him out of the loop on who writes what:

Today, I don't know anyone. Is it my fault? Theirs? What remains are website names: CinemaBlend, Deadline. I am told: “There are still good critics.” And I always answer: who? I say this without sarcasm. I'm told, "Manohla Dargis [of the New York Times], she's excellent." But when I ask what are the three movies she loved and the three she hated in the last few years, no one can answer me. Because they don't care! OK, if The New York Times is at my disposal then I’ll open it, read it, but that's it. I used to know a critics style of writing, their tastes, intimately! The sad reality is that today, the voice of Manohla Dargis – and it's nothing against her – doesn't matter enough for me to read her opinion on “Notes on a Scandal” or the fourth Transformers.

The rise of the internet age ruined the art of film criticism. What Scorsese and Schrader are saying is that a movie, hell, even art itself, should not be seen as “content”. Imagine having a Rotten Tomatoes rating for a painting, such as Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" — “it received a 95% Fresh score!”.

Art should always be a hands-on approach of attentive dissection. No matter the form. Now, with Rotten Tomatoes all but accepting another 500 critics for their aggregator system, the difference between a good film critic and a bad film critic is being blurred into oblivion.