DISTRIBUTION Critical Kudos

POSSIBLE POINTS OF INFLUENCE:

• The main victims are big tentpole productions, it is less of a danger for indie productions, and rave reviews has shown to often not lead to financial success as can be seen with multiple Warp films, the prime example being Tyrannosaur. This can be seen in the attitude of an independent film distributor below.

This an a consequence of disruption, and the convergence between audience and producers becoming more blurred, as Rotten Tomatoes consists of both reviews by critics and users.

I myself experienced how a whole group of teenagers I was spending a week with were looking forward to Suicide Squad, and how the Rotten Tomatoes review turned them off from watching it, including a hardcore Batman fan.

The power of Rotten Tomatoes:

Launched on a lark in 1998 by Web designer Senh Duong to catalogue reviews for Jackie Chan kung-fu flicks, Rotten Tomatoes has come to dominate the cultural conversation surrounding new movies and fundamentally change the calculus of putting butts in seats. It’s particularly, terrifyingly powerful among teens and 20-somethings who, as recently as five years ago, relied more often than not on “Bro, you gotta see this”-style word of mouth than any sort of professional critic appraisals to make their multiplex picks.
“Moviegoers love trailers. They pay attention to the TV spots. But Rotten Tomatoes is like the truth serum on the entire [promotional] campaign: are all the things you’re telling me about the movie true or not?” says Jon Penn, chief executive of the movie research firm National Research Group (NRG), which has tracked Rotten Tomatoes’ influence on audience behavior since 2010. “These scores are almost like a lubricant one way or the other. If it’s good, it helps you more than it did in the past. But if it’s bad, it hurts you even more.”

A negative review doesn't always mean a film becomes a flop.

There are, to be sure, plenty of movies that become runaway hits despite craptacular Rotten Tomatoes scores—the Twilight and Transformers franchises, Tyler Perry’sMadea series, and the latest two entries in the nascent DC Extended Universe (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad) before Wonder Woman. But the larger pattern shows that the correlation between Rotten Tomatoes scores and audience interest has become remarkably consistent.
According to the stats compiled by NRG, almost every major moviegoing demographic reports an increasing reliance on Rotten Tomatoes. “One of the things we track is, ‘How often do you check Rotten Tomatoes scores before you decide to see a film?’” Penn says. “In 2014, 28 percent of all moviegoers said they were checking. In 2016, it’s 36 percent. Teens went from 23 [percent] to 34. That’s an enormous jump.” 

 The studios preparing to fight back:

And the studios are only preparing for it to get worse. An independent study commissioned by 20th Century Fox in 2015 (and obtained by Vanity Fair), titled “Rotten Tomatoes and Box Office,” concluded, “The power of Rotten Tomatoes and fast-breaking word of mouth will only get stronger. Many Millennials and even Gen Xers now vet every single purchase through the internet, whether it’s restaurants, video games, make-up, consumer electronics, or movies. As they get older and comprise an even larger share of total moviegoers, this behavior is unlikely to change.”
The power of the review aggregator has infuriated heavy hitters like Brett Ratner,who—in an apparent fit of pique after his recent producing effort Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice earned an eye-watering 27 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes—called it “the worst thing that we have in today’s movie culture.”

An independent marketing executive states that the reason is that less attention and financial resources are being paid to the quality of the film, the primary focus is on the marketing. This shows the mentality behind Warp Films, they want to be convinced that the film they have to marketed is high in quality, instead of just convincing the audience of the quality with the quality as a secondary priority. 

The most obvious recourse to Hollywood’s Rotten Tomatoes conundrum, of course, may also be the simplest (at least on paper): prioritize filmmaking quality over marketing artifice, make better/more interesting/more appealing films, and stop blaming some stupid website for lackluster box-office returns.
“To me, it’s a ridiculous argument that Rotten Tomatoes is the problem,” says a marketing executive at an independent film distributor. “F*** you—make a good movie!”

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DISTRIBUTION - VoD Disruption

WHAT I ENDED UP APPYLING

• This all helped me to develop a cynical but ultimately realistic attitude that teenagers are less niche and open to different types of films, and that I always need to consider the commercial side.

Source: Click here.

The Death Of The Classic Movie?:

Reed Hastings, the Netflix CEO who co-founded the company long before “streaming” entered the popular lexicon, was born during a fairly remarkable year for film. 1960 was the year Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho astounded and terrified audiences, influencing a half-century of horror to come. It was a year of outstanding comedies (Billy Wilder’s The Apartment), outstanding epics (Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus) and outstandingly creepy thrillers (Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom—a close cousin of Psycho).But in the vast world of Netflix streaming, 1960 doesn’t exist. There’s one movie from 1961 available to watch (the original Parent Trap) and one selection from 1959 (Compulsion), but not a single film from 1960. It’s like it never happened. There aren’t any movies from 1963 either. Or 1968, 1955 or 1948. There are no Hitchcock films on Netflix. No classics from Sergio Leone or François Truffaut. When Debbie Reynolds died last Christmas week, grieving fans had to turn to Amazon Video for Singin' in the Rain and Susan Slept Here. You could fill a large film studies textbook with what’s not available on Netflix.

Netflix’s selection of classic cinema is abominable—and it seems to shrink more every year or so. As of this month, the streaming platform offers just 43 movies made before 1970, and fewer than 25 from the pre-1950 era (several of which are World War II documentaries). It’s the sort of classics selection you’d expect to find in a decrepit video store in 1993, not on a leading entertainment platform that serves some 100 million global subscribers. Netflix’s DVD subscribers enjoy a much wider selection (four million customers still opt to receive discs in the mail), but as the company shifts its focus to streaming and original content, cinephiles fear the cinematic canon is being left behind.

“If you're the biggest name in film streaming services, the less you offer in classic movies, the more you imply that classic movies have less to offer,” says Nora Fiore, a 26-year-old writer who has a blog devoted to classic cinema, “The Nitrate Diva.” “It's a terrible message to put out there.”

Netflix used to be more niche, it has become more mainstream?

It wasn’t always so bleak. Netflix, which just turned 20 years old, first expanded into streaming media in 2007. Back then, Fiore enjoyed the site’s streaming offerings, when the service was still new and the movie selection more eclectic. (There was even a selection of Criterion Classics, which ended in 2011, when Criterion struck a deal with Hulu.) “I saw Breathless for the first time on Netflix,” she says. “I saw Jules and Jim streaming on Netflix back in 2008 [or] 2009… They would also have some really weird movies that you got the feeling they bought with a package. Like, a movie I saw there for the first time that hardly anybody knows about is a movie called Specter of the Rose, a really weird poverty row film noir about a mad ballet dancer.”

But in recent years, DVDs have started going the way of the floppy disk, and Netflix, the golden child of the streaming revolution, has started catering less to the film nerd and more to the average bored consumer.

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Film professors and historians are particularly troubled by the situation.“It was very distressing when Netflix began to phase out their huge inventory of movies available on DVD with the goal of shifting viewers over to the streaming model,” says Stephen Prince, a cinema studies professor at Virginia Tech. “Now we see the danger inherent in this change—an emphasis on mainstream, contemporary movies has replaced what had been a broad archive of world cinema… Convenience biases viewers toward mainstream fare and makes films of the past or from other cultures less visible.

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