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Rotten Tomatoes Tackles Review Bombing By Requiring Users To Verify Ticket Purchase Before Rating a Film (cnet.com) 153

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
More changes are coming to review site Rotten Tomatoes. As of Thursday, the audience score for new movies added to the site will default to show ratings from fans confirmed to have purchased tickets to those films. From a report: "The goal is to strengthen consumer confidence around that audience score," said Greg Ferris, vice president of product for Rotten Tomatoes' parent company, Fandango. Here's how it'll work: Any site user will still be able to write a review of a film. But now users can opt to have their rating and review marked as "verified." That means they bought their film ticket on Fandango, the movie-ticketing site that owns Rotten Tomatoes. Later this year, AMC Theatres and Regal and Cinemark ticketing sites will also be participating. So if you buy your ticket for Aladdin at the box office, for example, sorry, but you can't get verified for that review. (At least for now: Dana Benson, Fandango vice president for communications, says that the site is "exploring options" for ways to verify box office purchases.)

Reviews associated with a ticket purchase will be marked with a "verified" icon. By default, the verified reviews will be used to make up the audience score shown on Rotten Tomatoes. To see the total audience score, including reviews by those who didn't purchase through Fandango or didn't opt in to the verification, users can select the "all audience" tab. "Every rating counts, but the score that we're putting out there is verified," Ferris said. The Rotten Tomatoes site will automatically verify that a ticket was purchased and that the time for that movie showing has already passed. For now, only one verified review will be allowed per transaction, no matter how many tickets were purchased.
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Rotten Tomatoes Tackles Review Bombing By Requiring Users To Verify Ticket Purchase Before Rating a Film More

Rotten Tomatoes Tackles Review Bombing By Requiring Users To Verify Ticket Purchase Before Rating a Film

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  • So, the RT reviews that are verified... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Thursday May 23, 2019 @11:56AM (#58642512)
    ... represent only those movie goers who forego their privacy so that they can post a verified review? Do the ticket sellers provide information to RT and vice versa?
    • Why is that not an acceptable subset? It seems like Fandango purchases represent a good section of mainstream film audiences. I would rather have to do business with Fandango or an affiliate to express my opinion than read the nonsense spewing from trolls, like the pro/anti-trump trolls with inflammatory comments and frequent grammar mistakes and misspellings that you see on slashdot.

      No one is forcing me to buy a ticket through Fandango (and I refuse to pay extra for the "convenience")....and the revie
      • }}} Why is that not an acceptable subset? {{{ --- Simple... it is not known whether or not that subset is representative of the entire sample. I doubt if RT will take the time to show a statistical validity so long as the reviews keep getting page hits. I rate movies on RT, and I only review those movies which I see. Yet I will not allow RT to exchange my private data with my ticket vendor. Therefore, my review is somehow seen by RT as less valid than someone who does allow their private data to be excha

        • Everyone is free to have their own opinion. I just happen to think yours is a bit too absolute :)

          According to TFS, Fandango owns RT. So the chances of your data not already being shared between them is probably around 0.

          Even if they were unrelated companies, I think you are being overly dramatic about the privacy implications. A review site knowing that you bought tickets on Fandango isn't going to give them access to a lot of information. User Spike113 went to see Avengers! Wow, now we can really make

        • it is not known whether or not that subset is representative of the entire sample

          And having what amount to essentially anonymous reviews does?

    • I think if you're willing to review a film and log in, adding a verified badge isn't exactly a crazy privacy violation. After all the reviewer is claiming to have seen the film. It's a good idea, especially when a filmmaker may be incentivized to post fake reviews for revenue.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jtara ( 133429 )

      RT reviews?

      When did Russia Times start having reviews?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ... And if you give a bad review to Captain America, does your data get sent to the studio so that they can get you banned from Twitter for not being progressive enough? Or just banned from going to the movies if you write too many bad reviews?

    • Yeah, not that their "ratings" meant much before, but now they mean even less....

    • Re:So, the RT reviews that are verified... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Thursday May 23, 2019 @02:16PM (#58643506)

      The problem is there is just too much hate on the internet.
      OMG a Female lead, the movie must be a feminist propaganda film.
      Look they have increased diversity, they must have let off so many talented actors to meet a quota....
      The trailer failed to impress me, so I am going to hate on the movie.

      This is from people who never watched the movie, but think it is important to dump their preconceptions, and state it as fact. Posting a review on the internet shouldn't really be a privacy problem, unless there seems to be abuse of the movie industry going after bad reviews.

    • ... represent only those movie goers who forego their privacy so that they can post a verified review?

      Looking at my last movie ticket I can't find any private information there which you can't already get from tracert on the IP with which I access the RottenTomatoes Server.

  • Irrelevant to me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Thursday May 23, 2019 @11:57AM (#58642522)

    Too many idjits out there for the "audience score" to be useful to me anyway. "Professional" reviewers may be pompous, contrarian, or just plain mean-spirited... but when a hundred or more of them are jumbled into a consensus I generally find it's not dissimilar to my own opinion.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That's nice. Most people find the audience score is far more accurate than that of the reviewers also employed by film companies.

      • Re:Irrelevant to me (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Kyr Arvin ( 5570596 ) on Thursday May 23, 2019 @03:08PM (#58643790)

        That's nice. Most people find the audience score is far more accurate than that of the reviewers also employed by film companies.

        I would disagree entirely -- I find actual audience scores to be way too positive across the board. Audience scores are not a cross section of society, they are a cross section of people who chose to see that movie. That already introduces a huge amount of selection bias, as the people who are going to see the movie are predisposed to like the movie. Otherwise, why would you go? There's the occasional outlier, the "I'm sure I'm going to hate this movie, but I'm seeing it anyway," but I don't think that counterbalances the little Timmys who just wanted to see a movie about a dancing bear, and is happy when he gets a dumb movie about a dancing bear.

        That leads to things like "Cinemascore," the audience polling firm who asks people leaving a movie to grade it on the A to F scale. Usually a movie that's at least good gets somewhere in the A range -- A+, A, or A-. If the audience reviews dip into the B range, that movie is in trouble (maybe because it's actually terrible, maybe because the audience thought it was going to be a different sort of movie and were disappointed by that). A movie really has to be horrible, objectively some of the worst of the worst, for it to dip down into the C range, and remember that C is supposed to be 'average' on the A to F scale. I don't know I've ever met anyone who actually liked Adam Sandlers movie 'Grown Ups 2'. It got 7% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, 19 out of 100 on metacritic (indicating "overwhelming dislike"), nominated for nine Razzies... and got a B on Cinemascore.

        There are some outliers on the critic side (The Last Jedi? Then again, The Last Jedi got an 'A' from an actual audience cross-section), but overall I still trust critics over audience ratings.

        • It sounds like you and the GP are both aligned with either Audiences or Reviewers. The reality is they represent a coverage of two completely different demographics.

          Professional reviewers are very aligned with the technical excellence of making a movie. Story, construct, character development, etc.
          Audience screws are very aligned with the mentality of the varying types of audiences that would frequent different movies.

          Take for example a comic book movie: Professional reviewers may hate it, audience may rate

          • Or on the flip side you can look at the recent Starwars efforts. Professional reviews may rate it, audience may hate it.

            I don't know where the truth here is, though. Nerds on the Internet hated The Last Jedi (I didn't like it much, but not to the degree of loathing that you'll typically find here). But as I mentioned before, a cross-sample of actual people exiting the theater, they really liked it. I can get why audiences would really like it (even if I disagree), though that fact flies in the face of the narrative pushed by the people who really hate it. The "most popular movie" was often a blockbuster that I felt was infer

        • Reviews or critics are to give expectation regardless who wrote them. They all are subjective. Once you read one, the opinion has already been put into your head, and you would expect certain things to happen in/from the movie. Liking a movie is an individual taste. The feeling toward a movie has already established when a person receives any information about the movie from any sources (e.g. friends, families, trailers, advertising, reviews, etc.). It is a type of confirmation bias. If the person hates it

          • If the person hates it in the first place already, the person will NOT go to watch the movie by his/her own will unless certain conditions are met (e.g. being dragged to go with friends/families).

            Oh, I certainly go to a movie with preconceptions, but I often go to movies that .. well, I don't think they'll be terrible, but I think they'll be 'meh,' and I've had a lot of "pleasantly surprised" moments. It's enough that I mentally tamp down any great expectations for a movie, because a disappointment feels worse than a "just about what I'd expected."

    • Meh. Good reviewers, professional and amateur both, are able to articulate why they loved or hated a particular movie. They recognize good or bad acting, brilliant or lazy writing, they might like the chemistry between actors or hate the soundtrack, and they put that in their reviews. Some of that stuff matters to me, the rest doesn't, and a well written review will help me guess whether I will like the movie or not. Star rating be damned, just read the reviews.
    • I think to be fair professional reviewers should have to disclose financial records in order to prove that they are not being paid by to write a good/bad review.
    • There is a well known experiment, to take a bottle full of marble, then ask 100 of people to evaluate the number of marble. In the end if you average the numbers you mostly get a correct result. I tend to see the same at play with cinema and RT : 1 person review is not useful but the aggregate is. Now there are comfunding factor as it isn't a random sample. But usually in the end the result match the film quality and that's what matters. That allowed me to avoid stinkers like the new ghostbuster, and watche

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      > "Professional" reviewers may be pompous, contrarian, or just plain mean-spirited...
      I think your comment may be pompous, contrarian, or just plain mean-spirited...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cederic ( 9623 )

      So you rate Black Panther as one of the finest films in cinema history?

      No, the professional reviewers can not be trusted.

  • So if you buy your ticket for Aladdin at the box office, for example, sorry, but you can't get verified for that review. (At least for now: Dana Benson, Fandango vice president for communications, says that the site is "exploring options" for ways to verify box office purchases.)

    Let me guess one reason why RT launched the feature before accommodating box office purchases: Tickets purchased online carry a convenience fee. This might be a dark pattern to encourage users to pay the convenience fee so that their reviews will count.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by flippy ( 62353 )

      So if you buy your ticket for Aladdin at the box office, for example, sorry, but you can't get verified for that review. (At least for now: Dana Benson, Fandango vice president for communications, says that the site is "exploring options" for ways to verify box office purchases.)

      Let me guess one reason why RT launched the feature before accommodating box office purchases: Tickets purchased online carry a convenience fee. This might be a dark pattern to encourage users to pay the convenience fee so that their reviews will count.

      I'm sure there will be some schmucks out there who get suckered in by the very strategy you describe.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Now that the "bombers" know about this requirement they'll just spend a little bit of their money to tank the movie.

    • Re:Won't help (Score:4, Insightful)

      by x0 ( 32926 ) on Thursday May 23, 2019 @12:07PM (#58642596) Homepage

      Now that the "bombers" know about this requirement they'll just spend a little bit of their money to tank the movie.

      You realize that makes no sense, right? The 'Review bombers' goal. presumably, is to make a movie fail to make money. So, you expect them to enhance the BO take in order to reduce the BO take?

      Brilliant!

      m

      • The 'Review bombers' goal is to tank the ratings. They usually don't care about the box office.

        And your comment is ... brilliant!

        a

        • not necessarily. I was following the issue, and IMDB Captain marvel had more 10/10 reviews than it had 1/10 reviews *before* it hit the box office. Positive review bombing is a thing, done by people supporting the idea of a film they're probably not even going to see. i.e. artsy hipster types who don't even like action films but support it because they think dudes are against it.

      • Gosh. Between "Review Bombers" buying tickets and not going just so they can leave nasty reviews and studios buying up all the tickets so they can claim a movie is popular [boundingintocomics.com], there's going to be a lot of sold out but empty theaters.

        If the theater-owners are smart, they'll start selling discount "overbook" tickets and keep the money for themselves...

      • Actually, there were a ton of 10/10 review for Captain Marvel on IMDB before it aired, they fairly outnumbered the 1/10 reviews. Review-bombing is happening on both ends of the spectrum. See for example an article on TheMarySue where one writer said male trolls were against people watching Captain Marvel, but admitted in the same she hadn't seen the film, had no interest in seeing the film, herself (it wasn't woke enough for her tastes). Taking out fake reviews might not raise scores, it might even lower th

  • So they are making themselves irrelevant (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What a brilliant idea! Make yourself wilfully irrelevant. I don't know if they noticed but there are a lot of places outside of the US, how will they verify those people, whether they are "allowed" to rate a film?

    Why not just go all the way and remove user reviews? If they don't like what they say they'll remove it anyway.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        For some people it's 4chan or bust. The truth is determined by the size of your ability to mobilize the hoards.

  • I primarily buy my movie tickets through the AMC app and then have the attendant scan my phone. I'd hope that RT would have ways to track these purchases as verifiable. I agree with the intention behind this move for RT, having a bunch of people tank a movie that haven't even seen it creates a meaningless score. I do find it interesting when viewers give a movie a better score than reviewers, often for midling movies (around 50ish from reviewers). Sometimes good summer popcorn movies can be found this w
    • I buy everything through the AMC A-List app too. From the summary: "Later this year, AMC Theatres and Regal and Cinemark ticketing sites will also be participating."

  • It's gone off. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JoeyDot ( 5981942 ) on Thursday May 23, 2019 @12:13PM (#58642644)
    Long ago I remember someone screaming in my ear in the pub screaming in my ear that RT was the ultimate authority after recommending me a series.

    If this was ever true, RT has long since lost its seat at the table. It's essentially trash and completely unreliable.

    What topped it for me was their reviewers marking The Orville as awful and STD as amazing when assuredly the reverse is true.

    This is reinforced by the reversal of the trend in viewer ratings.

    I'm wary of this change from RT. It sounds like something that could be used to also suppress when the audience ratings differs from their established reviewers. Simply fiddle the numbers each time and claim review bombing.

    I don't think this change is a coincidence coming on the heels of RT deciding before hand what should float and what should sink but that clearly being out of touch with their audiences.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The Orville and STD are an interesting example.

      Critics mostly preferred STD, because it was fresh and intricate. The Orville was liked by sitcom fans and people pissed off about STD being too diverse or whatever their beef was. Objectively The Orville was doing a lot of plot recycling, especially in season 1, just with some hit-or-miss jokes. Season 2 was highly variable, with some awful sitcom episodes and some really good sci-fi ones.

      Anyway, this caused a schism between the more objective reviewers and th

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The numbers don't really support that. STD's viewship numbers are multiples of the ones for The Orville, especially as season 2 of the latter only retained about 60% of the season 1 audience. Probably wasn't helped by the first two episodes of the season being terrible, which is a shame because it picked up a lot later.

    • What topped it for me was their reviewers marking The Orville as awful and STD as amazing when assuredly the reverse is true.
      This is reinforced by the reversal of the trend in viewer ratings.

      It's almost like different people like different things.
      It's almost like the paid reviewers are consistent people while audience score is varied by people who would typically see said movie.

      Not almost; It's definitely like you don't understand how to read the ratings.

      Simply fiddle the numbers each time and claim review bombing.

      You're ignoring something that actually exists and skews the result while complaining that RT doesn't agree with your personal opinions. You're like that guy who complains about the road outside of his house falling apart and then complains abo

  • You Said:

    ""So if you buy your ticket for Aladdin at the box office, for example, sorry, but you can't get verified for that review. (At least for now: Dana Benson, Fandango vice president for communications, says that the site is "exploring options" for ways to verify box office purchases.) "

    Please, Please, be very careful in going this direction. This can be very easily forged! Doing verifying via Fandango or some other database is easy. The server side will send queries directly to the ticketing serve

    • And the outcome of the forgery would be terrible! TERRIBLE, I say! Fake movie reviews! OMG!

    • Paper tickets? Paid with cash? How can that be verified without a backstream database query??

      It's easy. Participating theaters print a barcode on your paper ticket that indicates the theater, movie, date and seat number (or just an incrementing number if seats are not assigned). Rotten Tomatoes releases an app to read the barcode and verify the ticket. If someone else tries to use the same ticket (or a photo of it), the app will reject it since it has already been used. I suppose if you really wanted to

    • It's even easier--just use your cell-phone to make a video, geostamped, of you watching the movie. You'd probably better record the whole thing, y'know, just in case...

  • Notice only RT goes against Darth Mouse.

    The Live Action Aladdin and Lion King deserve to be bombed as crappy ideas.

    • and you have just proved RT action to be the correct one -- as you have already 'rated' both these movies poorly without even having seen them
  • If they'd silently flagged accounts which posted a review before the movie was released (good or bad, although TFA only focuses on bad reviews, when paid fake good reviews are just as much a problem), then they'd have a nice database of known dishonest accounts. Then they could simply generate two scores - one with the dishonest account review scores, and one without. Compare the two and if they deviate significantly (either way), then you know there are shenanigans going on in the review score. And they
    • Movies often leak before their official release which compounds matters. Released and available are two different things. It's very hard to determine when a movie was actually available. If you try to determine this looking up the release date, it's likely to be wrong. Not everyone buys a ticket, there are other ways to watch movies that I wont mention.

  • ... one can review a film? That'll be a really big "No Thanks".

    First, I couldn't care less what the denizens of Rotten Tomatoes think about a movie (that site's operators appear to be rather full of themselves, no?). Second, if I feel so strongly about a film that I think the Internet wants to know my opinion--as though that would ever be the case--I'll post a review of it on [fill-in-the-social-media-site-name], or this site, or my personal web site.

  • What are they thinking? Nobody will bother to do this. Any privacy issues are the least of it. Nobody is going to bother to take a picture of their tickets or attach a screen shot, etc.

    And it's easy to fake, anyway.

    What they need instead is effective measures to identify bots and spam mills that use human operators. And that's hard.

    It's the same problem faced by e.g. Yelp, Amazon, other similar review sites, and social media sites. Some sites really don't even try. (e.g. NextDoor - geez, at least check for

  • This all seems like a huge fuss over a problem that could be solved pretty easily with a bit of code. In addition to giving movies an overall rating, just add a "people like you" rating. Done. Haters can share their hate with other haters and be ignored by everyone else.

  • This is why we can't have nice things.

    You had to know something like this was coming.

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