How much do Rotten Tomatoes (or critics') ratings influence you?

[John Clark]

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever has a 0% rating with ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN reviews!
This is must the be the worst movie in history. Now I want to see it!

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It's been years and years since I've seen it, but I don't think it's the worst film I've ever seen (let alone in history). - On the other hand, maybe my memory of it has faded enough. Given that I've only seen it once or maybe twice, it probably wasn't good enough to rewatch with any regularity.

As for metacritic/RT or any reviews, I don't really pay that much attention. If the premise sounds like something that I might like, I'll probably check it out (Ticket prices here aren't totally absurd thankfully).

If my friends really want to see something, I'm usually the designated driver so I have the end say. I'm usually fairly easy going about taking them though.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

You're confusing Metacritic with Rotten Tomatoes. RT gives a simple Fresh/Rotten assessment to the reviews, while Metacritic assigns each review a score of 0-100 based on what each reviewer wrote about it, then averages all the scores.

No, I'm not. The problem is that the average gives you no insight into score distribution or standard deviation. A movie with half 100s and half 0s gets the same score as a movie with all 50s. Wouldn't you rather watch a movie that there's a 50% chance you will think it's the greatest movie ever than one you will definitely think is just okay?

 

[cardinal biggles]

OK, now I'm not even sure how MetaCritic arrives at their scores. Just randomly and unscientifically, I plugged the Metacritic scores for four current releases into Excel and asked Excel to spit out both the mean and median scores. Here's what I got:

Suicide Squad (53 reviews)
mean: 47
median: 42
Metacritic score: 40

Bad Moms (33 reviews)
mean: 62
median: 63
Metacritic score: 60

Star Trek Beyond (50 reviews)
mean: 69
median: 70
Metacritic score: 68

Ghostbusters (52 reviews)
mean: 63
median: 65
Metacritic score: 60

So these Metacritic scores are actually rounded down (albeit it's less dramatic with Beyond, because it's only a point off, and its score isn't a nice big round number) from either the mean or median of reviews. I also find it interesting that the mean and the median for three of the four films are separated by only 1-2 points.

I get what you're saying in theory, but I can't recall a film where the reviews dramatically polarized into half negative and half positive rather than distributing in a "bulge" of "good," "average," or "bad" reviews. I'd be curious to see you produce evidence of one.

 

[Starbreaker]

I'm not going to watch anything rotten in theaters. I will probably go watch one that gets 90%+ if it wasn't on my radar before. I agree with the tomatometer about 99% of the term in terms of good or bad.

 

[Gaith]

OK, now I'm not even sure how MetaCritic arrives at their scores.

Simple: they weight some critics higher than others.

 

[cardinal biggles]

But they won't tell you who they've weighted, so the whole thing's a mystery.

 

[lurok]

Influence me? Not at all. There are some critics whose opinions I respect and enjoy your writings. Sometimes their reviews are more entertaining than the films (especially if it's obvious genre fodder). But I usually only use RT as a rough guideline for, say, an interesting-sounding film that's straight-to-DVD (like the recent Bone Tomahawk) or curiousity for how they rank old stuff I like (like Walter Hill's The Warriors)

 

[JoeZhang]

Yes - the reason that critics exists is opportunity cost - I only have so much time and there is an opportunity cost attached to actions. I was going to go and see this before after the reviews, I'll catch it on streaming because the opportunity cost is too high. The time I would have spend on this film, I'll now spend fine dining instead as the food critic reviews of the place I have selected are excellent.

So it means that I'll defer watching a film with poor reviews until the opportunity cost is lower - for example, I'll watch them on a flight or when on the treadmill when doing a 10km - so that if they turn out as bad as suggested, I haven't wasted 'prime' time.