Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group announced this morning that they had bought Flixster, the social media movie ranking website who intriguingly themselves bought the leading critics review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes in January of last year. RT of course now also changes hands to WB as part of the deal. So a little incidentally, a major movie studio now owns Rotten Tomatoes! Though we are told there won't be a conflict of interest as WB won't change the way Rotten Tomatoes operates or Flixster for that matter as they will continue to be run independently - though we imagine over time subtle and maybe not so subtle changes will be brought in. Whether they will include WB sending £300 to the OWF approved RT critics Mike Edwards or Shaun Munro to turn in positive reviews of the studio's output is impossible to predict! We imagine it will be Flixster which receives the most obvious upgrades. We know WB have been flirting with distributing their films via online and digital forms and we've already seen their 2008 mega hit The Dark Knight streamed directly via Facebook - so I imagine they will work with Flixster on this further. Full press release after the jump and thanks to /film for the perfect image to the story;
BURBANK, Calif., May 4, 2011 Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group today announced an agreement to acquire Flixster, a highly popular movie discovery application company with over 25 million worldwide users per month. The acquisition also includes Rotten Tomatoes, a top website devoted to film reviews, information and news. Under the terms of the deal, Flixster will continue to operate independently and will expand its services beyond movie discovery to enable digital content ownership and delivery across any connected digital device. Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group will utilize the powerful Flixster brand and technical expertise to launch a number of initiatives designed to grow digital content ownership, including the recently announced consumer application Digital Everywhere. This studio-agnostic application will be the ultimate destination for consumers to organize and access their entire digital library from anywhere on the device of their choice, as well as to share recommendations and discover new content. The Flixster acquisition and Digital Everywhere, combined with the Studios support of the UltraViolet format are all part of an overall strategy to give consumers even more freedom, utility and value for their digital purchases. Driving the growth of digital ownership is a central, strategic focus for Warner Bros., said Kevin Tsujihara, President, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group and Office of the President, Warner Bros. Entertainment. The acquisition of Flixster will allow us to advance that strategy and promote initiatives that will help grow digital ownership. Flixster is currently the number one movie discovery application on mobile platforms with over 35 million downloads to date, including Android, Blackberry and iPad, and ranks among the most downloaded of all iPhone apps. Rotten Tomatoes is one of the most trusted and influential brands in movie reviews with over 12 million unique visitors per month. Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes will remain fully independent. The Flixster team will stay in San Francisco and the Rotten Tomatoes team will continue to work autonomously in Los Angeles. Were thrilled that Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group shares our vision for how anytime, anywhere digital entertainment can become an amazing user experience, said Joe Greenstein, co-founder and CEO of Flixster. Were excited that Warner was willing to make this kind of commitment to a leading independent consumer platform. We look forward to working with Warner as well as each of the other studios to innovate and build products that users will love. Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group has been the consistent change leader in the home entertainment arena. It is a founding member of the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), which is launching UltraViolet this year. UltraViolet will provide cloud-based storage and give consumers the ability to watch digital entertainment across multiple platforms such as connected TVs, PCs, game consoles and smartphones. And as the market leader in video-on-demand and electronic sell-through, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group recently became the first studio to distribute films directly to consumers via apps on Apples iOS platform and Facebook.