5. Rotten Tomatoes Matters
Allow me to begin by clarifying; I think that Rotten Tomatoes is a wonderful website. I'm not alone - the popularity of RT is astonishing, and has entered the parlance of even the most casual of film goers. And if the outpouring of grief at the recent death of Roger Ebert taught us anything, it is that people truly value intelligent, well reasoned and personal film criticism. Ebert would not have fit in well with Variety magazine - one cannot imagine him deigning to refer to the audience whom he so respected as "auds", for instance - and his deeply heartfelt and honest approach to criticism endeared him to readers around the globe, as a critic and, more grandly, as a great writer. This latter division is, I think, important to understanding why Ebert was so loved. You see, when people read his reviews, I would argue that it was for their literary merit rather than for a recommendation of what films to see and what films to miss. In considering the notion that "RT Matters" as a myth, I mean that critical opinion of a film has little importance or effect upon its performance at the box office. Take Transformers 2. The film has a 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and was absolutely trashed by the critics almost to a man. They said it was incomprehensible, sexist, racist, lewd and idiotic beyond compare. And yet despite their best efforts, the film took $836 million international box office on a $200 million budget. And Transformers 2 is not the only example..look at Transformers 3! Film after film, the critics line up to trash - the entire Twilight saga, for instance - and yet they take down the box office! And the idea that this is merely a problem in film criticism was exploded roundly by the phenomenal success of 50 Shades of Gray, and do you want to bet, just like the Twilight books which inspired it, that the critics will critically eviscerate the film adaptation and then watch in horror as it rakes in the cash? And it is not even evident that critical plaudits equals box office returns - look at Lynne Ramsay's We Need To Talk About Kevin, a film which made the top of more than a few Best of 2011 lists, and yet it took less than it's $7 million budget at the box office. It is a shame, I think, that Rotten Tomatoes doesn't matter more as an influencing body, but c'est la vie, n'est pas?