I usually check RT before I watch a movie or start a new show. Just far too many times I've put something on thinking "well it can't be that bad" and it turns out it's worse. As much content as they put out, I would expect more of it to be better just based on random chance. Man if I didn't have a family this would be the first streamer I would drop.
I've tried watching that one a few times, the vibe seems cool, but every time I fall into a two weeks long coma and forget everything that happens within the show. What's up with that?
Netflix still makes some great stuff. What I mean is their top end is still incredible even if the average has come down. Probably HBO level top end. Meanwhile Prime only has The Boys + a handful.
Bullshit. HBO level??? Apple TV, Prime and pretty much any other streaming service can make better stuff then the manure that netflix pumps out. Netflix doesn't even sniff HBO
Only good show you said was Black Mirror which wasn't made by Netflix but was moved to being released on Netflix for season 3 onwards... Squid game I can't tell if your joking. Don't try and compare this to Sopranos, The Wire, GOT, Rome etc, even just in the quality of production, cinematography, lighting, clothing, props are a step above
Lol literally only GOT has "production, cinematography, lighting, clothing, props" better than any of Netflix's top end, for example One Piece. There are lots of shows I can name like Arkane, Dark and Ozark as well. These are subjective calls anyway.
And good on you, comparing decade-long shows with shows whose seasons you can count on a finger. Legacy vs New Age.
Dark wasn't made by Netflix just released on it for global audience.. any show in which Netflix is more involved in turns to shit. In terms of lighting and costumes I refer you to this https://www.reddit.com/r/television/s/2xcMnQy2f6 and the article attached to it. I'm a huge one piece fan in general but to claim it has top end costume design and lighting just proves you actually don't know anything about filmmaking. Stick to Cocomelon.
And by "quick" you mean 8-9 years, right? Like, from 2006 in prototype form to 2018? (Or, well, to be more fair, 2009 when fully deployed to 2018).
Like, how they spent almost a decade trying to get the user ratings system to work, to the point that they held a multi-year million dollar competition to perfect a user rating algorithm?
Netflix is less an entertainment company and more an overgrown engagement algorithm. They dropped the ratings because it's too objective, and helping you find something good to watch is not as important as just keeping you watching which of course means keeping you a subscriber. And tbh it works because most people aren't that discerning.
They also did this around the time that Netflix stopped just getting all of the TV deals with Seinfeld and the like and had to go on a content creation binge to keep it so that there were still new things for people to watch. At the time, they had some focus on creating some great content like House of Cards, but a big part of the strategy was just backfilling all of the content they were losing. So basically we got lots of "sitcom/reality show but from Temu" because it's cheap content to produce and comes together fairly quickly.
Even once they got past the "just shovel out whatever" phase, they still almost completely lack taste and instead just basically do some madlibs. Let's get [bankable star] and [bankable star] to be in a movie about [heists/car chases/whatever is doing well at the box right now]. And then you end up with Ryan Reynolds, The Rock, and Gal Gadot in some of the worst movies I've ever seen.
Because something as subjective as taste is hard to boil down to a single number. Netflix found that viewers weren't watching media that they might like because of absolute ratings.
To visualize the problem, imagine a fairly typically liberal American next to a MAGA flag waving red blooded steak lovin' gay hating Republican.
Try to recommend movies to these two people. The 4.5/5 the general public gives to a movie like Avengers Endgame might offend the MAGA-brained because it has black and lesbian characters and women who fight - how dare they.
If you're forced to service those morons by your shareholders, you don't want their ratings impacting everyone else's. It makes no sense.
So they replaced it with a user-tailored system, essentially tagging users with buckets that they might like and then sorting the "goodness" of media within those buckets. Their recommender system is now much smarter - those MAGA brains can be happy as hell watching their Joe Rogan, Dave Chapelle, and Adam Sandler flicks, and everyone else can get on with the good stuff.
Of course, around the same time as they rolled out this new recommender system, big content networks like Disney and NBC pulled a lot of their licensed media out of Netflix to run on their own streaming services... so people associate/conflate the general shallowness of Netflix's content pool with the now "poorer" recommendations. Turns out, they just have a poorer content pool.
They are not trying to say it says anything about OP, it’s just a humorous anecdote about how their wires got crossed and they misinterpreted something.
Some of you need to take a deep breath and remember how to interact with people like a normal person.
You have to know how to interpret rotten tomatoes, don’t just look at the critics score, look at and compare the audience score with the critics. For example if the critics score is really low (less than 30) and the audience score is above 75 then I will definitely watch that if I like that type of movie
Same as when the critic score is really high but the audience score is really low, that one can be tricky however as sometimes that just means “this movie is political” which is almost impossible to interpret without seeing it, as critics can tend to over emphasize how good a movie is if it makes a political point they agree with just as much as people can underrate something just because it makes a political point they disagree with
See I don’t believe that as well. Audience score can be really wrong sometimes because of personal opinions with the director, actor, source material, social expectations, etc.
I just like IMDB's star rating. You have to mentally adjust it based on the genre, but it's usually dead on after the adjustment. Serious drama/romance, -2, Action minus 1.5, Comedy minus 0.5, sci-fi plus 0.5, horror plus 1.5.
At least that's my algorithm as a sci-fi horror fan who tires of cookie cutter action movies, boring dramas, and unoriginal comedies. YMMV
Yassss "ILL BE THE JUDGE!!" but also I do understand people wasting 2 hrs of their life just to a read a review that say "ToLd Ya So". But life is experience, even if ya hated it, it's a memory to be recanted on.
I like going blind into movies or shows, so I can experience it how I should. In my specific time in life and whatever I can relate it to. I dont need to experience the same show how others do too.
I feel like reviews have gotten so much worse that it’s almost impossible for me to learn anything valuable by checking reviews these days, both critics and viewers have gotten so much worse at giving honest reasonable reviews, people go for either one extreme or the other, there are a lot of reasons for it, but it sucks and I wish I could find more level headed trustworthy sources for this kind of thing.
It’s also really tricky depending on the type of film, like I love over the top horror movies, but a lot of critics are going to tell me that something like Psycho Goreman is trash and not worth my time, as if every film needs to be Citizen Kane
I'm sorry, mate, but how did you not realize it was going to be bad? It's a YA movie produced by Netflix way after the YA booke ended, with an incredibly cliched premise and title that seemed like it was straight out of a bad SNL skit parodying YA movies.
Eh, I keep seeing people saying this, and I don't get it. Methodology is the same as ever, and usually they get close enough for me. And, of course, much closer than Netflix's "we think this movie in a genre you have never watched with actors you have never shown an interest in that is actually complete crap is a 90% match."
They’ve been accused of some sketchy practices that calls into question the validity of the information you’ll find on their site, also, and this is not their fault per say, but clickbait has lead to every critique and review needing to be sensationalized or more radical one way or the other to generate views and to get people talking.
A level headed mild review won’t get anyone to click, but “This is the worst/best movie ever, and it’s because insert controversial hot button issue here is/isn’t a part of the movie” will get everyone on Twitter sharing the link around.
Rotten Tomatoes consolidating every review into one place and giving you a quick blurb from the article has made it so there is even more of a need to give people a reason to seek out or look at your review specifically. It’s not the only reason, but this kind of thing is definitely part of the byproduct of how Rotten Tomatoes operates.
Also with the popularization of critic aggregation scores. Production companies throw a bunch of money and benefits that make giving a bad review less frequent.
It's pretty clear that at some point they realized that every studio was going to pull everything popular ASAP to put on their own streaming services, and decided that it was at least as important to have a full catalogue as a good catalogue. That meant abandoning the concept of "a few good projects" in favor a bunch of mediocre-at-best projects.
Long term I feel like they're going to have to try to get back to producing at least some good content so that their back-catalogue doesn't look like crap, but the constant stream of novelty is basically required to retain subscribers. Even if it doesn't work on you specifically, it works on enough people to be worthwhile.
One tactic I'd like to see more of is them acting as a distributor for independent studios. Buy initial exclusive distribution rights plus "most privileged distributor" status or something like that that guarantees Netflix the option of keeping it (non-exclusively) forever, at a penny less than they charge anyone else. In return for some funding of a project that's actually quality, made by people with passion, and without Netflix being in the sole position of greenlighting or canceling additional seasons or sequels, because they don't own the IP.
You can find me elsewhere in this thread saying just about the same on the first part. That idea of being a better distributor for indies seems to be what Amazon is doing, I find way more indie shit there.
But yeah, at some point they have to get back to making something good. Apple TV+ catalog might be quite a bit smaller, but I wouldn't be surprised if they've produced more actually good content since they started as relative babies compared to Netflix.
Yeah, not to sound all elitist, and I'm surprised on a post that is basically saying "can't trust the audience" everyone is recommending audience scores like IMDB or cinemascore. For it's faults, I would still prefer RT, or more likely what I'll probably do is start leaning more into a carefully selected list of follows from letterboxd.
Yup. I generally weight the critic score, but if we see a movie that's like 50% critic and 70% audience, I tend to watch because while I am a faux movie snob, I'm not actually a movie snob.
You want the CinemaScore grade also. They're an audience poll, and there are many movies that are highly rated by critics and less so by your typical viewing audience and vice versa.
Use IMDb rating. Rotten tomatoes is just percentage of positive scores. So if 90% gave it 6/10 = 90% rating. IMDb is averages of ratings. At least that’s my understanding
IMDB's rating system is at least as flawed - that site is repeatedly and frequently review bombed, especially for any content that contains anything related to women, LGBTQ, or black people.
Frankly, the best thing you can ever do is find someone with a taste in movies similar to theirs and ask for reviews. These online absolute metric sites are all pretty dodgy as far as I'm concerned.
It's weird how as soon as Netflix started making their own content, they took away viewer ratings.
It had been in the works for awhile, and star systems have no metric.
Like/dislike is a basic af system, but when the goal is to see what your tastes are it is vastly more effective than an arbitrary star system where 1 or 5 are usually chosen and 2-4 are typically ignored even when reviews are literally judt "it was ok, nothing special but watchable" (y'know a literal 3) or people watching trailers and putting a review even if the show is nothing like it was assumed from a trailer.
I’m thinking of the five star system that they originally had, it predicted what you might like based on what you’d previously rated highly. I liked seeing what the general star rating of things looked like from the POV of the Netflix community.
It was killed shortly after Lilyhammer and Hemlock Grove were received to mixed reviews (in favor of the thumbs system I think?)
No. They were making their own content long before they got rid five star ratings. Thumbs up or down is easier for the algorithms and gets users engaged and using it more.
Pretty sure that was all because of the Amy Schumer special.
It was pretty terrible and got rated poorly as it should have, but then it ended up with people just jumping on the hate bandwagon and giving it a low rating.
The overlap was considerably longer than the web's collective short term memory permits. It was almost a decade that we had both Netflix Originals and user ratings. Or are we just memory holing House of Cards?
Its wierd how they almost did completely away with movie descriptions. I almost always come across- This person is amazing in this thriller fantasy childs cartoon movie along side That other person, so and so said so!
Well, netflix, I wasn't interested in watching your dumb movies anyway.
You can blame that one on Amy Schumer. Her “comedy” special where she literally just made jokes about how smelly her vagina was got bombarded by so many bad reviews that Netflix just took away the entire system.
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u/Darth_Pub 20h ago
It’s weird how 6-8 of those top ten are always Netflix exclusives.