Welcome to another edition of The Playlist Podcast, a discussion about film news and other film and television related items.
On this episode, I’m joined by Playlist Managing Editor Kevin Jagernauth to add to the ongoing debate this summer on how review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes has been affecting the box office, both positively and negatively.
“The Dark Tower” opened this weekend to a weak $19.5 million, despite being based on a popular Stephen King series and featuring star-power in Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. It is the latest in a series of films — including “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword,” “Baywatch,” “The Mummy,” and “Transformers: The Last Knight” — to be based on a pre-existing IP and underperform at the box office because of terrible reviews (the highest RT score out of those aforementioned films is 28%). Inversely, “original” films (or films with an IP that hadn’t gotten the big-screen treatment yet) have found great success, including “Wonder Woman,” “Dunkirk,” “Girls Trip,” and “The Big Sick.”
READ MORE: Stephen King Wants R-Rated ‘The Dark Tower’ Sequel, If It Ever Happens
We dive into this phenomenon, and offer up hopes that studios will learn the right message from this (i.e. make better movies), but also express concerns about the flaws in the Rotten Tomatoes system, and studios taking the wrong lessons from this effect (a “sameness” in chasing the mold by the tentpoles that are massively successful, such as Marvel and “Star Wars“). We also point out notable exceptions to this summer trend (such as “War for the Planet of the Apes” struggling to cross $400 million worldwide despite stellar reviews and “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” nearing $800 million worldwide despite poor reviews).
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