Revealed: Hollywood Spin Firms Are Paying Nobodies $50 Per "Review" to Fraudulently Boost Movies' Rotten Tomato Scores

Many of you are not geek culture warriors, and that's okay. So you probably do not know the backstory that makes this revelation so delicious.

For years, corporate Hollywood, the media, and the political left have been claiming that all of the Woke Bombs they produce have actually been greeted enthusiastically by the public -- but Right-Wing Wreckers and Russian Intelligence Officials (seriously) are "review-bombing" huge hits like Captain Marvel, The Little Mermaid, and We Had Rangz.

Corporate Hollywood fed stories to the shill media to claim that Russian Intelligence Officials -- seriously -- were interested in dividing society and encouraging Right Wing Extremism with Movie Review Disinformation. No seriously, stop smirking.

The shill media wrote endless articles attacking right-leaning, or merely normie-leaning, critics of woke movies and TV shows. Weird how this shifted so quickly from "RUSSIAN BOTS ARE GIVING CAPTAIN MARVEL BAD REVIEWS AND WE MUST STOP THIS SUBVERSION OF SOCIETY" to "Gary from Nerdrotic is giving Captain Marvel bad reviews and we must attack and censor him."

Almost as if Gary from Nerdrotic was the actual intended target from the beginning, and the bullshit about Russian Intelligence Services down-voting Captain Marvel was a pretext to start the censorship ball rolling. (Just as the banning of Alex Jones was a test-case to start banning anyone on the right.)

Disney inveighed on Rotten Totatoes and IMDB to start rejecting negative reviews for their shitty movies, and the corrupt corporate-media aligned Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB eagerly capitulated.

And now we find out the truth: That through these years of leftwing censorship and lies, it wasn't right-wingers or Russians "review bombing" these movies to change their Rotten Tomatoes scores.

It was Hollywood itself, paying PR agencies who in turn paid "reviewers" $50 per review to claim that crap movies were actually good.

No wonder Hollywood leapt to the claim that "Right-Wingers are conspiring to alter our films' ratings." Because Hollywood had been doing that themselves all along, and the left always -- always -- accuses you of what they themselves are doing.

Vulture reveals that the Russians have been calling from inside the house all along.

In 2018, a movie-publicity company called Bunker 15 took on a new project: Ophelia, a feminist retelling of Hamlet starring Daisy Ridley. Critics who had seen early screenings had published 13 reviews, seven of them negative, which translated to a score of 46 percent on the all-important aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes -- a disappointing outcome for a film with prestige aspirations and no domestic distributor.

But just because the "Tomatometer" says a title is "rotten" -- scoring below 60 percent -- it doesn't need to stay that way. Bunker 15 went to work. While most film-PR companies aim to get the attention of critics from top publications, Bunker 15 takes a more bottom-up approach, recruiting obscure, often self-published critics who are nevertheless part of the pool tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. In another break from standard practice, several critics say, Bunker 15 pays them $50 or more for each review. (These payments are not typically disclosed, and Rotten Tomatoes says it prohibits "reviewing based on a financial incentive."

In October of that year, an employee of the company emailed a prospective reviewer about Ophelia: "It's a Sundance film and the feeling is that it's been treated a bit harshly by some critics (I'm sure sky-high expectations were the culprit) so the teams involved feel like it would benefit from more input from different critics."

"More input from different critics" is not very subtle code, and the prospective critic wrote back to ask what would happen if he hated the film. The Bunker 15 employee replied that of course journalists ("journalists," lol -- ace) are free to write whatever they like but that "super nice ones (and there are more critics like this than I expected)" often agreed not to publish bad reviews on their usual websites but to instead quarantine them on "a smaller blog that RT never sees. I think it's a very cool thing to do." If done right, the trick would help ensure that Rotten Tomatoes logged positive reviews but not negative ones.

Between October 2018 and January 2019, Rotten Tomatoes added eight reviews to Ophelia's score. Seven were favorable, and most came from critics who have reviewed at least one other Bunker 15 movie. The writer of a negative review says that Bunker 15 lobbied them to change it; if the critic wanted to "give it a (barely) overall positive then I do know the editors at Rotten Tomatoes and can get it switched," a Bunker 15 employee wrote.

This may explain how many reviewers will write a pan for a movie like Ghostbusters (2016) or Captain Marvel but then you'll see that negative review has been counted as a positive review in Rotten Tomatoes' very binary, positive-or-negative accounting. Companies like this are reaching out to shill reviewers and telling them that they can write negative reviews if they like -- but when they submit these reviews to Rotten Tomatoes, they should mark their negative reviews as positive.

I also discovered another negative review of Ophelia from this period that was not counted by Rotten Tomatoes, by a writer whose positive reviews of other Bunker 15 films have been recorded by the aggregator. Ophelia climbed the Tomatometer to 62 percent, flipping from rotten to "fresh." The next month, the distributor IFC Films announced that it had acquired Ophelia for release in the U.S.

Ophelia's production company, Covert Media, didn't return requests for comment. Bunker 15's founder, Daniel Harlow, says, "Wow, you are really reaching there," and disagrees with the suggestion that his company buys reviews to skew Rotten Tomatoes: "We have thousands of writers in our distribution list. A small handful have set up a specific system where filmmakers can sponsor or pay to have them review a film." Noted.

The Ophelia affair is a useful microcosm for understanding how Rotten Tomatoes, which turned 25 in August, has come to function. The site was conceived in the early days of the web as a Hot or Not for movies. Now, it can make or break them -- with implications for how films are perceived, released, marketed, and possibly even green-lit. The Tomatometer may be the most important metric in entertainment, yet it's also erratic, reductive, and easily hacked.

"The studios didn't invent Rotten Tomatoes, and most of them don't like it," says the filmmaker Paul Schrader. "But the system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don't go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do."

Chris Gore of Film Threat says this is barely even the tip of the iceberg. Obviously this isn't just this one lowly PR company -- every studio hires multiple firms to buy favorable reviews to game the Rotten Tomatoes system.

But Rotten Tomatoes will not take a single step to stop favorable "review bombing" by paid industry shills.

But they will continue claiming that when the next woke piece-of-shit gets poor reviews, it must be due to RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE OPERATIVES, and start banning reviews as "inauthentic" and "coordinated."

posted by Ace at 04:30 PM

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