8 Times Audiences Were Blamed For Movies That Failed

Purely in terms of box-office numbers, the 2017 summer movie season was a terrible one. With a reported $3.8 billion in North American ticket sales, it was - at the time - the worst summer since 2006, and a 14.6% drop from the previous summer.

Once these figures started rolling in, the industry quickly looked to place the blame somewhere other than on its own bad movies, and soon enough, a scapegoat was found: Rotten Tomatoes.

The movie review aggregation website has grown in prominence over the last couple of years, and this obsession with numbers has even seeped into the filmmaking system, to the point where executives and directors feel that the fan and critic scores on Rotten Tomatoes are directly to blame for box-office disappointments.

After that aforementioned abysmal summer, The New York Times quoted director Brett Ratner as saying that the site would be "the destruction" of the film business, a sentiment that Hollywood agreed with:

"Mr. Ratner’s sentiment was echoed almost daily in studio dining rooms all summer, although not for attribution, for fear of giving Rotten Tomatoes more credibility. Over lunch last month, the chief executive of a major movie company looked me in the eye and declared flatly that his mission was to destroy the review-aggregation site."

Does Rotten Tomatoes have some impact on a movie's success? Maybe. But, for a second, let's forget that it doesn't exist. Would something like Gods of Egypt have blown the doors off the box-office? Probably not. Keeping budgets tight, making a great film and marketing it correctly are far more important factors when it comes to a movie's success or failure.