I am a huge believer that in today’s culture, people don’t pay as much attention to individual voices as to the aggregate score.”Īdds Peter Adee, the marketing head at Overture Films: “I definitely think that if you’re fresh, it helps sell the movie. “People want to know what the consensus is. Can they help drive business? Yes,” says Mike Vollman, MGM’s marketing chief.
Movie marketers say they like the sites because they can boost movie admissions. Whereas TripAdvisor and Zagat base their marks on consumer ratings, the movie aggregators generally use professional critics, although Rotten Tomatoes includes a number of citizen-reviewers who write on obscure websites, like Georgia’s self-proclaimed “entertainment man” Jackie K. In a way, the review aggregators are to movies what TripAdvisor is to hotels and the Zagat guides are to restaurants - one-stop sites for consensus opinion. As the sites grow more prominent, however, they also are attracting questions about their methodologies, and who exactly qualifies as a film critic in the Internet age?
The studios are always searching for new ways to sell movie tickets, and they are now looking to review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and newcomer Movie Review Intelligence to generate box-office buzz by amplifying the sound of the critical chorus. But a closer look at Saturday’s full-page ad revealed a more unusual endorsement: a 98% “fresh” rating from the website Rotten Tomatoes. Disney’s newspaper advertisement for “Up” featured the kind of blurbs typically associated with a critical hit, with Roger Ebert, Leonard Maltin, and the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern among the reviewers quoted.