OPINION: Movies aren’t making money because you’re making bad movies: Hollywood, take responsibility

Whenever anyone utters the word “summer”, a Hollywood exec gets their wings. In fact, even just the suggestion of a large break of free time combined with heat that demands the luxurious embrace of an industrial cineplex air conditioner is enough to make several producers salivate.

Summertime is the time every studio in the rat race brings out their big hard-hitters, the projects they’re certain will turn them a sizeable profit. Franchise sequels, new IPs, 3D spectaculars and more all come to the summer theater thunderdome to see who will come out on top at the box office. Only there’s one problem. Who do you blame when they don’t perform well…. At all?

It would seem much to Hollywood’s shock that films even experts were banking in to be big, including but not limited to the most recent Michael Bay action-fest Transformers: The Last Knight and the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson helmed wacky comedy Baywatch both made a great less than what was desired or expected. And they’re not the only ones. This goes against trends of recent years, and as a result studios everywhere have been thrown into a tizzy over who to blame for the dismal performance of their supposed “big hits”. Now that the summer is over and the seas have calmed, it would seem most execs have come to one cohesive answer: Rotten Tomatoes, the popular movie review-amalgamator site.

However, in my personal belief this generalization that easy access to a combined review score is driving down profits is just what Hollywood wants to believe. It’s a simple, clean cut answer that doesn’t take in all the messy other threads in this quilt of causes. You know when even the Chinese market fails to pick up the slack of the dismissive US one that something is wrong with the movies you’re making.

Firstly, studies and review analysis along with box office numbers show that audiences aren’t being driven away from movies with lower numbers. Even the abysmally panned and joked-about Emoji Movie managed to have a decent opening weekend and make double a profit on it’s small $50 mil budget, despite it’s uncommonly low 6% on the signature Tomatometer. One could argue that the previous Transformers movies were less than spectacular pieces of cinema, yet even just 3 years ago Age of Extinction grossed over one billion dollars. Rotten Tomatoes still existed back in 2014, and was still viewed with respect and trust (for the record, Age of Extinction earned a 18%). So clearly Hollywood has had no major qualms with the site up until now, because they feel it only now has started to affect their profit margins. But why have profits started to dip? And why doesn’t it make sense to just blame Rotten Tomatoes?

For one, people are less likely to splurge their hard-earned cash on lackluster films nowadays in an economy where the price of movie tickets and all the frills, bells and whistles that come with going to a cineplex have ever-risen. Whenever anybody pitches a movie for a group activity, at least in my experience, it’s usually met with a heavy sigh and a “If you’re buying”. Movies are expensive, they require time coordination, snacks are scalped to insane prices and sneaking in alternatives often makes you feel guilty along with holding some risk of getting caught. Combine that with a forgettable or god-forbid just bad movie, and you’re left with regrets and a sour taste in your mouth regardless of how much popcorn you just chowed down on. If a person’s not interested by your movie as a whole or sees it as more of the same, they’re very apt to pass it up in favor of something further down the release timeline.

Within lies the actual problem: more of the same. The problem with Hollywood, albeit understandable, is that once it hits gold with a formula it is prone to beating that formula into the ground until it now longer yields money, or perhaps even longer if they’re desperate. When Transformers: The Last Knight’s premiere date was closing in, many began making videos and placing bets on how the plot would unfold, noticing several very obvious retreads and similar plot contrivances throughout all Transformers movies. Once the film was out, it became clear many had predicted the new film beat-for-beat nearly exactly, which brought light to the problem that very little of the films ever truly changed. It’s for similar reasons that experts are already expecting the superhero film market to implode within the next few years, audiences get bored with few changes, leaving them to look elsewhere. 2014’s The Lego Movie became a surprise critical and and box office hit for it’s original premise and humorous writing, because it was something new and unique in a sea of sequels and “Oscar Bait” (granted, you can’t do a lot with regular unbranded Legos plot-wise). This summer’s Wonder Woman also managed to rake in the big bucks after it was critically praised for being a fresh take on the superhero origin story that had flooded the market with sameness as of late. It’s clear that Hollywood is, on some level, refusing to accept that it may be time to change their strategies and try something new, instead continuing to bury their head in the sand and keep investing big bucks into summer films that flop.

Lastly, there’s one big logical hole in blaming Rotten Tomatoes for the death of this summer’s film industry: Rotten Tomatoes is the film industry. More specifically, Rotten Tomatoes is an offshoot of movie-ticket prepurchasing site Fandango, owned by conglomerate NBCUniversal, which in turn, owns Universal Studios. More specifically, NBCUniversal has at least a 75% stake in the site, which gives them majority ownership. It wouldn’t make sense for them to want the end of the summer film market. “But Emma!”, you say. “Couldn’t Universal thesibly mark up their own scores and sabotage competitors?”, you quip. A fair point! However, Universal’s own Tom Cruise-helmed Mummy remake scored a pitiful 16% and made much less than expected, which sent shockwaves as it was their purposefully-made supposed big summer hard-hitter. This doesn’t take in the other Universal pictures releases that similarly have performed poorly on the Tomatometer or to a similar extent at the box office. Universal’s ownership of Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t make it immune from it’s scorn, or immune from producing a film that underperforms.

In short, Rotten Tomatoes is simply a tool that combines multiple review scores into one amalgamated score. Nothing more, nothing less. If Hollywood wants to know what’s really making their wallet-linings a little thinner, they need to take a look in the mirror. Hollywood’s refusal to acknowledge upcoming market changes in taste has led them to stubbornly sit by films nobody wants or finds interesting as they fail time and time again. Of course they would want to blame Rotten Tomatoes, because the amalgamation of public and critical scores only further cements the outcry for new content, something Hollywood desperately seeks to turn a deaf ear to. If anything, Rotten Tomatoes gives us, the audience, the power to let people know what’s worth paying for and regulate market change, which is obviously frightening to executives. But if this fight was really about ticket sales, they’d have nobody but themselves to blame. If you want people to pay for movies, make movies worth paying for. If people want something, give it to them, don’t give them what you want them to want. It’s really that simple. Change with the times, or wind up the fossils of yesteryear.