Reactions as a film PR company has reportedly been paying critics for positive reviews in order to inflate the Rotten Tomatoes scores for certain films

Reactions as a film PR company has reportedly been paying critics for positive reviews in order to inflate the Rotten Tomatoes scores for certain films.. 

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.

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.” — If someone wanted to change their review, the Bunker 15 employees knew a RT editor.

Of course, the RT scoring calculation is just # of positive reviews / # of total reviews. The rest of the article talks about how no one really gives a fuck about critic views or reviews anymore apparently. They look at a number and go “Maybe it’s worth the rental fee”.

“Ringer found that Tomatometer scores do correlate with box-office returns, especially for comedies and horror films, but the authors admit that the pandemic may have scrambled moviegoing habits in ways that data may not fully account for yet.” 

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.”)