There is not much love for Rotten Tomatoes inside the industry, and the past year or so has really seen the friction with the review aggregator come into view. Meryl Streep has pointed out that the site amplifies an already disproportionate amount of male voices, Brett Ratner has voiced his discontent with the service, while movie studios have spent the summer trying to figure out what do with the low scores they blame on helping a handful of blockbusters underperform. Now, Martin Scorsese is sharing his perspective, and the legendary director is no fan of Rotten Tomatoes either.
READ MORE: Critics Want What You Want: Good Movies, Period
Writing an op-ed for THR, Scorsese says the site is “hostile” and “insulting” to filmmakers, starting with its very name. The director then cites Darren Aronofsky‘s “mother!” — which received an F-grade CinemaScore (though it did receive 68% on Rotten Tomatoes) — as a picture that many were rushing to judge, but few thought about deeply. Scorsese said the race to write about its CinemaScore underlines a problem with how movies are reported. Here’s an excerpt of what he had to say:
The brutal judgmentalism that has made opening weekend grosses into a bloodthirsty spectator sport seems to have encouraged an even more brutal approach to film reviewing. I’m talking about market research firms like Cinemascore, which started in the late ‘70s, and online “aggregators” like Rotten Tomatoes, which have absolutely nothing to do with real film criticism. They rate a picture the way you’d rate a horse at the racetrack, a restaurant in a Zagat’s guide, or a household appliance in Consumer Reports. They have everything to do with the movie business and absolutely nothing to do with either the creation or the intelligent viewing of film. The filmmaker is reduced to a content manufacturer and the viewer to an unadventurous consumer.
These firms and aggregators have set a tone that is hostile to serious filmmakers—even the actual name Rotten Tomatoes is insulting. And as film criticism written by passionately engaged people with actual knowledge of film history has gradually faded from the scene, it seems like there are more and more voices out there engaged in pure judgmentalism, people who seem to take pleasure in seeing films and filmmakers rejected, dismissed and in some cases ripped to shreds. Not unlike the increasingly desperate and bloodthirsty crowd near the end of Darren Aronofsky’s mother!
….many seemed to take joy in the fact that it received an F grade from Cinemascore. This actually became a news story—mother! had been “slapped” with the “dreaded” Cinemascore F rating, a terrible distinction that it shares with pictures directed by Robert Altman, Jane Campion, William Friedkin and Steven Soderbergh.
…What about the experience of watching mother!? It was so tactile, so beautifully staged and acted….The horror, the dark comedy, the biblical elements, the cautionary fable—they’re all there, but they’re elements in the total experience, which engulfs the characters and the viewers along with them. Only a true, passionate filmmaker could have made this picture, which I’m still experiencing weeks after I saw it.
Frankly, it’s some fair points by Scorsese and you can even turn to “Blade Runner 2049,” where the box office performance (or lack thereof) has almost overshadowed the accomplishment of Denis Villeneuve‘s film.
Thoughts? Hit up the comments section and let us know.
