https://www.vulture.com/article/rotten-tomatoes-movie-rating.html
"In 2018, a movie-publicity company called Bunker 15 took on a new project:
Ophelia, a feminist retelling of
Hamlet starring Daisy Ridley. Critics who
had seen early screenings had published 13 reviews, seven of them negative,
which translated to a score of 46 percent on the all-important aggregation site
Rotten Tomatoes — a disappointing outcome for a film with prestige aspirations
and no domestic distributor.
But just because the “Tomatometer” says a title is “rotten” — scoring below 60
percent — it doesn’t need to stay that way. Bunker 15 went to work. While most
film-PR companies aim to get the attention of critics from top publications,
Bunker 15 takes a more bottom-up approach, recruiting obscure, often
self-published critics who are nevertheless part of the pool tracked by Rotten
Tomatoes. In another break from standard practice, several critics say, Bunker
15 pays them $50 or more for each review. (These payments are not typically
disclosed, and Rotten Tomatoes says it prohibits “reviewing based on a
financial incentive.”)
In October of that year, an employee of the company emailed a prospective
reviewer about
Ophelia: “It’s a Sundance film and the feeling is that it’s
been treated a bit harshly by some critics (I’m sure sky-high expectations were
the culprit) so the teams involved feel like it would benefit from more input
from different critics.”
“More input from different critics” is not very subtle code, and the
prospective critic wrote back to ask what would happen if he hated the film.
The Bunker 15 employee replied that of course journalists are free to write
whatever they like but that “super nice ones (and there are more critics like
this than I expected)” often agreed not to publish bad reviews on their usual
websites but to instead quarantine them on “a smaller blog that RT never sees.
I think it’s a very cool thing to do.” If done right, the trick would help
ensure that Rotten Tomatoes logged positive reviews but not negative ones.
Between October 2018 and January 2019, Rotten Tomatoes added eight reviews to
Ophelia’s score. Seven were favorable, and most came from critics who have
reviewed at least one other Bunker 15 movie. The writer of a negative review
says that Bunker 15 lobbied them to change it; if the critic wanted to “give it
a (barely) overall positive then I do know the editors at Rotten Tomatoes and
can get it switched,” a Bunker 15 employee wrote. I also discovered another
negative review of
Ophelia from this period that was not counted by Rotten
Tomatoes, by a writer whose positive reviews of other Bunker 15 films have been
recorded by the aggregator.
Ophelia climbed the Tomatometer to 62 percent,
flipping from rotten to “fresh.” The next month, the distributor IFC Films
announced that it had acquired
Ophelia for release in the U.S."
Via Frederick Wilson II.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
