 does movies live. I'm Adam. It's Friday. I always have to pause and think what day of the week it is because it's all kind of the same to me. Hope everyone had a good week. We're celebrating. I got some Coke in the house again. This was kind of a big hot button issue for me on Tuesday night's live stream. If you caught it I was pretty upset. It was a sprite situation in the house for a while and you know I thought I could kind of turn the corner and try something else but it didn't work. So we're back on Coke. It's not good for me but everybody has to have a vice. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining. Hope you're having a good night. You know who's not having a good night? Ron Tomatoes and we're going to get into that. That's the topic. That's the bulk of the discussion tonight is going to be this vulture article that came out. It made its rounds and it turns out some of the critics out there aren't the most genuine. I know it's a shock to absolutely no one. I've even said this myself and I am a certified Ron Tomatoes critic. I'm going to break down a lot of what goes into it, how I was certified, the process. I might even go through and do a review live with you guys and show you the process that it takes. Let me see if I can bring up a tab. I got to make sure I'm signed in first. I don't want to awkwardly jump over there and have to have you wait while I sign in or cover the screen or something. Yeah, we got the none too. Okay. I think we're good. Yeah, we're good. Okay. Anyway, first thing I want to point out. I got to point out Patreon. Patreon.com slash Adam does movies. It's one way that I make a small amount of cash on this channel from awesome individuals, much like yourselves. Some of you are Patreon supporters or YouTube joint supporters and I appreciate it. There's not a lot of money to mine out of YouTube when you're kind of a middle, middle tier YouTube creator. I don't even know. Maybe I'm like bottom tier. I don't know the breakdown of numbers, 100,000 subscribers, maybe that's middle and everything below that's just kind of, you know, fighting for food, fighting for scraps. But there's been a lot of support on the channel. I appreciate it. And I have an upcoming review for Down With Love that's going to be exclusive to members. There's a couple hang on mithril members that don't want to give up their movie requests. That's fine. They paid for it. I tried to push people into doing the roast because I can put those on the channel. They do pretty well. I just did the howling seven for crying out loud and it did pretty, pretty decent support. Views aren't great, but with it came a lot of new subscribers and that helps a lot. But a film like Down With Love that came out in 2003 with Rachel, something or another. Why can't I think of her name? Rachel McAdams isn't right. Oh my God, she has the fish lips. Why am I forgetting her name? I just reviewed the movie. I'm not going to look at chat because I want to figure it out. Rachel Zellwigger. Is that right? Rachel Zellwigger? Okay. And Ewan McGregan. Ewan McGregor. Holy fuck. I should probably just get off right now and just walk away. It was a good stream. We'll talk to you later. That's going to be exclusive. Nobody's going through the algorithm right now and Down With Love isn't showing up. All right. Other things. I have a review for None 2. None Shall Pass. Coming up tomorrow. I'm editing it. It's going to happen tomorrow. I put out a short review leaving the theater already. You can check that out on the channel. Spoiler wasn't a fan. I'm probably shocking to hear, but I wasn't a fan of the None 2. Back in the habit. It doesn't have a subtitle thing. It's just the None 2. The title is as boring as the film. Films is boring as the title. It matches up. It makes sense. Other things coming out. I am in the process of rewatching cinematic Darlene Van Helsing. There's a roast for that coming out for Patreon. If you don't know what these roast videos are, I don't know where you've been at, but I'm really making them a flagship thing for the channel. Trying to put out a couple a month. They're like 25 to 30 minutes in length. Oh, I thought I lost my background, but it's just changing. I can bring this up a little bit. Let's go like this. I can go full screen. We don't need to look at Patreon anymore. I'm really focusing on the roast though. They're a lot of fun. I script them all out. They take a lot of work, but if you are a Mithril member, you are rewarded by getting a shout-out and getting a pick from a long list of these letterboxed videos that I put together. If you follow me on Letterboxed at Adam Does Movies, you can find that list. We got our first super chat of the night. Yeah, thank you, Josh, by the way, for pointing that out. I should have said something. Super chats outside of Patreon and YouTube join memberships are how this channel is surviving. The ad revenue from Google is terrible. I say it every time. I'm going to beat this dead horse to the ground until we get more Patreons, more join memberships, and more super chats because super chats are how I engage and they just help a lot. So as they come in, I read them off and you guys are free to talk in the live chat as well. All right. So we got one from Josh Carlos for $4.99. Thank you, Josh. She says, been watching Supernatural. I'm on season seven very early. God, I love how he puts very early seven seasons in because Supernatural went like a million seasons. It's insane. My wife loves Supernatural and I don't even think she finished because Josh, I don't know if you know this, but the show gets pretty bad after like 14 seasons. Everything's going to get pretty bad. Maybe you'll like it still. I don't want to, I don't want to I never watched Supernatural. My wife loves it, but I'm pretty sure it was just because she thought the two lead characters were hot. Love the show. What are your favorite horror films slash series? Keep up the good work, Adam. Thank you, Josh. I appreciate that. My favorite horror films and series, it's funny because I know like the horror community is really big into their properties, right? Their Friday the 13th, their Halloween, their exorcists. I don't think I have that at all. I like horror movies pretty much one off for the most part. I don't really have any infatuation with the franchise because they almost always become garbage after one or two films. Halloween, for instance, I liked the first Halloween a lot. I don't really like any of the other ones. H2O, I felt like was okay. Halloween 2, that was terrible. Really silly follow up to the first pretty awesome movie. But then I really enjoyed the second version of Halloween 2 just titled Halloween that came out six years ago or however long it's been. And then that trilogy that just ended last year was very hit or miss also. But for the most part, I enjoyed that. So Halloween movies, I'm interested in them. Alien, again, if you want horror sci-fi, I love Alien. I love Aliens. And then after that, it's kind of a shit show. I don't know if I really have any film series that's stuck the landing. I'm trying to think. Scream, obviously, has been more consistent than other ones. But even Scream, I'm just like, you kind of know what you're going to get every time. SAW was never really my cup of tea. The first one kind of gets by, it skates by on its major reveal at the end. I'm more of a one-off guy. Some movies like Seven, which isn't horror, it's thriller, Zodiac. I'm more in the thriller camp as opposed to slasher horror films. But again, The Thing is one of my favorite horror movies. It's one of my favorite movies of all time. John Carpenter, awesome Halloween, of course. So yeah, I like that kind of stuff. Thank you, Josh, for the super chat and for the question. It was a great question. TV shows, I don't know, Last of Us was decent. I think the game is quite a bit better. I still wasn't sold on the casting of Ellie in the HBO show. But it wasn't too bad. It wasn't too bad. Should we get to it? Should we get on to it? I think we should. Let me make sure I got the right tab going. I'm going to share this tab instead. I'm going to bring her up. All right, I'm going to take a drink of coke because I feel like I've been talking nonstop. We got to slow down a little bit. I'm glad I did because we got another super chat from Life Is Good, who is a Patreon and I just did his roast of the Howling Seven. I always say the, it's just Howling Seven or Howling Mystery Woman or Howling New Moon Rising. This is all the same movie. It goes by all those titles. Okay, he asks for $5. Thank you, Life Is Good. How often does one get to choose a movie as a mithril member? From the list, of course. Was there any line dancing in the nun asking for a friend? When I got the request to watch Howling Seven, New Moon Rising, a vampire series, I assumed. I knew nothing about the Howling. I hadn't seen any of them. I did not imagine I would get line dancing, let alone seven or eight different scenes of line dancing. That was quite remarkable and that's a very fun roast. If you didn't check out Howling Seven, I highly recommend it, even if you haven't seen the movie, I show lots of clips and I break down everything. It's very nice. It's very fun. There is no line dancing in the nun that I can remember. So thank you for the question. Life Is Good. Thank you for the support. Very beautiful. All right, folks, let's get into this disgusting thing. Here's, I want to get this out of the way too. I have not read this article. I had a few people send me this article or at least send me the tweets and whatnot saying that rotted tomatoes is corrupt and it's all over and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm sure it's not even remotely true. This is probably going to be a isolated situation. That said, there's probably a lot of isolated situations that kind of add up to a bigger overall thing going on in the company. Also, from what I could gather, it's not rotten tomatoes, but it was another thing, but we'll read it. We'll get through it. I don't know which view you want if you want this one or this one. We'll start here and as the text gets smaller, we'll flip. The decomposition of rotted tomatoes, the most overrated metric in movies is erratic, reductive and easily hacked in yet Hollywood and yet has Hollywood in its script. You're also going to have to suffer through me like barely being able to read. Oh my God, this font's tiny. We're going to enhance. Yeah, that's a beautiful enhancement. 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 have seen early screenings had published 13 reviews, odd lucky for some, seven of them negative which translated to a score of 46% on the all-important aggregation site, Rotten Tomatoes, a disappointing outcome for a film with prestige aspirations and no domestic distributor. This person, this article is very, who wrote this? Just a screen time? Maybe the authors of the bottom? Oh, Lane Brown clearly does not care for rotten tomatoes. She's very aggressive on it already. It's not very impartial is what I'm getting at. All right. Oh, I'm sorry. I skipped it. I skipped a part. But just because the tomato meter says the title is rotten, scoring below 60%, 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 and 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 financial incentive. Here's the thing. How would Rotten Tomatoes know? It's an aggregator. They do have a process of vetting critics. It's based on how many published articles you've done, like how many reviews you have published on a blog, on a website, or how many videos you've published and reviewed. So I for the longest time couldn't even apply, even though I've had a channel for many, many years because most of my content was in like a rant format about a movie or it was a movie feud where I picked two movies head-to-head and I did technically review them in a way, but it was in a way that wasn't traditional and it wasn't a one movie per video. It was a couple, you know, two or three or four. It wasn't until two or three years ago where I really started doing actual reviews of specific individual movies that I thought, okay, well I can apply now and I applied once and after a review process they asked some follow-up questions. I'd write a little about myself, what makes me stand out from other critics, and then they eventually said, yeah, you're in. All right, you're in. And from there it was a pretty smooth albeit shitty onboarding process where you go to a website, you fill out some stuff, and then you have to leave it to the hands of whoever's working over there to put your bio in that you give them and a profile photo that you give them like you can't just do it yourself. And I noticed when I gave them my bio, if you look on Rotten Tomatoes it doesn't even make sense. Like here I can go to it. Let's go to it. Okay, so right now let's share this tab. This is the Rotten Tomatoes site. I mean, do I have to, I don't think I have to explain what Rotten Tomatoes is, but maybe I should for the sake of the video. Basically it's just a pool of critics that determine if a movie's fresh or rotten. It's binary. It's a zero or a one, a fresh or a negative, which is a terrible way to review a film. I would say 85% of the movies I see fall in the four to seven range. Right in the middle. Really just five, six, and sevens. That's the range that almost all movies I see fall into. And then you have your really bad movies and your really great movies. But on Rotten Tomatoes it's either a really great movie or a really bad movie because a C plus is basically an A plus. When you look it in the terms that they present it. For instance, the Nun 2 is at 45% on Rotten Tomatoes with an audience score of 76. 45% are the pros. Those are the people like me and a bunch of other jackasses that got approved by the, whatever, by the board of Tomatoes. I imagine there's a bunch of just red Tomatoes and mustaches and whatnot. And they have monocles and they look it over. Audience score are just people that come to the site and they review the movies because they like movies and they want to share their opinion. Audience score nine times out of 10 in my experience is higher than the critic score because people often only see a few movies a year. So they're going to be entertained. They have a much easier, breezy kind of persona about them. They want to have some fun at the theater. They're spending a lot of money. They don't want to feel ripped off. A movie critic goes to several movies a week. I see multiple movies a week. So we have different expectations. It's our job, or at least it's my job, to give you both my opinion and also tell you what to expect from the movie so you can form your own. Because you should never just say, oh, Adam doesn't like it. I don't like it. That's not how this should work. Even, I mean, I don't think there's anyone that's followed me for a couple of weeks or a couple of years that says, yeah, I agree to him 100%. There's always going to be movies we disagree on. Now, it's the level of disagreement that might be a little smaller. And you could say, we're like one to one. And so if he doesn't like it, I know I'm not going to like it. And that's fine. Okay. So here we go. None is at 45%. I can add a review because I haven't done it yet, but I've seen the movie. Oh, shit, I can't actually. Well, we'll do it for fun. Okay, so I'm going to add the review, right? Okay. Jesus. I can either leave a fresh or a rod in. Well, I did not like the movie. So I would leave a rod in. But again, I don't think this movie is like a two or a three. I think it's like a five out of 10 or a six. I would say it's like a six out of 10, which I still consider. I know that's 60%. And on Ron Tomatoes, that's that's a fresh, I guess, for some reason. In my opinion, it's not worth watching. So I'd say rod in. And then you can give it an optional rating. But again, that that's so useless because you don't really, that doesn't really come into effect. People would have to dig to see the great. And then you do a poll quote about the movie, a sentence or two, pretty, you know, kind of engaging, whatever. And then I would have to give a link to my YouTube video. So this is why I can't submit it yet, because I don't have my actual none to review out. I only have the out of theater short. I probably could just say, I mean, this thing is so stupid, it wouldn't know. I could put a link to like, a rick roll, I could rick roll this thing. And I don't think it matters. And then I would just select the publication, Adam does movies, and I would submit it. And that's it. That's all there is to it. There's nothing else to it. Nobody at Ron Tomatoes like intercepts this and has to approve it first, it just straight up gets thrown out into the ether as is. So it's really on us independently to put our best foot forward or our paid foot forward, which is what some of these other critics are doing. But that's the entire process. There's nothing more to it. Oh, I was going to say what my bio is, I don't even know how to fucking find it actually. How do I find my bio? This is, oh my God, this is so screwed up because here's the other this is why this is such a janky thing. I had an Adam account on Ron Tomatoes for like, for 15 years, whenever Ron Tomatoes came out and let people sign up to give reviews. That's when I did. Well, I then made an Adam does movies account that they were supposed to tie it to. And they didn't like combine the accounts, even though they were using the same Gmail and it just got really it got messy. It's absolutely tragic what's going on with their website. But regardless, I guess I can't show you the bio because I don't even know how to get there. This is not the Adam does movies. Oh my God. All right, we're moving we're moving back to the article. That's what we're here for anyways. Oh, there's super chats coming in. I better I better pay attention to those. We got another one from Josh Carlos 98 scream six after repeated watches gets worse. What's some really bad film revelations you've seen after multiple watches that impact the story. Enjoy. It's kind of funny Josh they say after repeated watches. I've seen this criticism about video games. People will say you know after 50 or 60 hours of playing whatever game it's no longer fun. It loses its value. Well, I mean you got 50 or 60 hours of fun out of it. So I feel like you already got the value. You said you watch scream six repeatedly. Obviously, you liked it enough to watch it repeatedly. A lot of movies, you just can't watch more than once because they're just not good enough. I think if you're getting a couple watches out of a film, it's a good film. You're obviously going to start to see the wheels come off. You're going to start to see things that stand out more and maybe kind of make the movie a little worse. But you can do that with pretty much everything. My favorite one of my favorite movies Jurassic Park, the original, I can watch it out and see lots of faults with it. But it's still in my opinion, a phenomenal film. As far as I can't think of movies that upon repeat viewings have gotten worse for me. I can think of movies that have gotten better for me and typically those are comedies like Austin Powers. I didn't really care for the first time I watched it. And then watching it again, I was like, oh my God, something clicked with the humor. Same with Cable Guy. There was just something that I wasn't lining up with the presentation the first time or I had an expectation that wasn't there. It's rare, but it does happen. Castaway was one of the most recent ones where the first time I watched that movie, I don't know. It was probably that I was a teenager or I just was expecting something else from the ending. But I left it thinking, eh, it's overrated. I didn't think it was that great. But now watching it last year, I fucking loved that movie. I thought it was absolutely fantastic. So it definitely happens. It's rare. But I can't think of a movie where, actually, you know what? I said one recently. I said one on the last stream. Shazam 2 is my only regret this year where I was too positive on that movie. And I didn't even need to rewatch it. I just, it sunk in a little bit more. And I think that's one of those, I don't take my kids to a lot of movies, unfortunately, because it's really expensive. I have the regal pass I pay for, which is great. But they don't have passes. So any time I take them, it's like 40 bucks. And they don't really have much interest like I used to when I was a kid to go out to movies that they're fine watching them at home with a big TV. It's comfortable, whatever. And they get annoyed by people on their phones like I do. So it's just, it's a shit show of a family getting upset with people being rude. My point is, I think because I was with them at the movie and we were having fun together, it just made the movie a little better. But Shazam 2 isn't great. That one definitely, I would drop down a peg or two. Thank you again, Joshua. I think this is Joshua again. Why does he have two different, is it just shows in two different colors? Okay. 199 this time, movie feud, Aliens vs Terminator 2, Judgment Day. That would be a fun feud, Carlos. We do occasionally do feud Fridays here. I've only done one so far. And that was debating Tony from Hack the Movies if Alien 3 is good. Spoiler, it's not. I won that feud. Aliens vs Terminator 2 would be awesome. And I don't even necessarily, we could maybe engage with the audience on that. I could just present both since I love them both and we could kind of do a super chat back and forth conversation. I could maybe like try to get some people on the show like some of the Patreons or you could super, I know what Tony does in Hack the Movies, he'll have people super chat like 20 bucks and then he'll pull them in, he'll pull their video in, but that's a little sketchy for me. I'm not that comfortable doing that yet. But we could maybe think, we could think of something or maybe you could like submit a video review ahead of time and I could present it on the live stream. There's options. There's options. Great, great idea though. And he's back again. Josh Carlos today is just a superstar, 4.99. Thoughts on a modern Nightmare on Elm Street film with today's tech that could make a really interesting Elm Street movie or they will screw it up. I'd probably say more the latter but Nightmare on Elm Street, I honestly always get these confused. Nightmare on Elm Street is Freddy, right? That's Freddy Krueger. That movie to me doesn't hold up very well. I watched it a couple of Halloween's back. He does like the long arm stretching. I don't know. I do agree with you that that's one movie with the tech. They could definitely soup up and they could make it really trippy with all the Nightmare killing and things like that. It would, if you can get the right director behind it, I unfortunately just don't know who that director is at this point. The dude that's doing Halloween is doing the new Exorcist movie franchise. That's going to be a new trilogy. Can't say the first one looks very good. Although I like the idea of two little girls being possessed at the same time and kind of sharing minds. That's kind of cool. We'll see if it works. Yeah, up in the air. I think you get the right director on it. You can make it shine. Thank you, Josh Carlos. Let's get back to this beautiful article that we're looking at. Okay, in October of that year, an employee of the company emailed a prospective reviewer about Ophelia. It's a Sundance film. Oh, let me do the character voice. It's a Sundance film and the feeling is that it's been treated a bit harshly by some critics. I'm sure Sky High expectations were the culprit. So the teams involved feel like it would benefit from more input from different critics. More input from different critics is not very subtle code. And the prospective critic wrote back to ask what would happen if he hated the film. The bunker 15 employee replied that of course, journalists are free to write whatever they like. But that super nice ones and there are more critics like this than I expected, often agreed not to publish bad reviews on their usual websites, but to instead quarantine them on a smaller blog that RT never sees. I think it's a very cool thing to do. If done right, the trick would help ensure that Ron Tomatoes logged positive reviews, but not negative ones. Fun fact, a movie recently came to Netflix. You are so not invited to my bat mitzvah. It is at 93% on Ron and Tomatoes with an audience score of only 64%. This is so incredibly rare to see not just a small disparity between the critics and the viewers, but like a large one like this. 30% difference folks, almost. 72 reviews. And I'm not a conspiracy theorist in the slightest, but this movie was fucking terrible. This is one of those where I'm at the like two or three out of 10. This isn't one of those middle of the road. It's a C minus. I can push it positive. No, this was straight up garbage. It wasn't funny. It wasn't emotionally impactful. It had nothing going for it. Everything was off in this film. And yet 93% makes me scratch my head. And the fact that there's only 72 reviews makes me really scratch my head because there should be far more reviews on this movie, which makes me think we're getting a lot of the critics that were maybe, maybe pushed, maybe gently massaged into giving it a positive review. Itchy knows. Someone's thinking bad about me. That's what my grandma would say. There are currently five Rodin reviews. Spoiler, one of them's from me. Adam does movies with the top one from Andy. An orgy of conspicuous consumption that's so distasteful. Yeah. I just, I find it very hard to believe that these are sincere reviews. That's all. Let's get back to the article. Well, one more thing about me, and I brought this up with Sean Chandler when he was on the live. If I'm on the fence, I just won't even put the review on Rodin Tomatoes. If I think a movie is split down the middle, and I can be convinced one way or the other, I just don't, I just, I don't need to, I'm not required to post that review to Rodin Tomatoes. It's just easier for me to do it when I'm very confident if a movie's bad, just from not only an opinion standpoint, but just kind of, as a matter of fact, if a movie looks really bad, that's not, I guess it's kind of subjective, but there should be some sort of objectivity to how a movie looks, right? If like the camera guy is filming the carpet and you only see like half of a foot during a dance number, or if there's just some really horrid color grading, there are some things that we have to say are objectively bad, or objectively good. I'm a front end designer for a web firm by day, and we're taught, I went to college for visual design, I know what visually is appealing as far as like bringing certain colors together, pairing different font types together as opposed as using like comic sans and wingdings. So we have to have some sort of objectivity to stand on. Anyway, okay, where are we at? Oh, yes. Oh, I have one more really good story about this. We'll read a little bit more and I'll tell you. Between October 28 and January 2019, Rodin 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. The writer of a negative review says that Bunker 15 lobbied them to change it. If the critic wanted to give it a barely overall positive, then I do know the editors at Rodin Tomatoes and kid and get it switched. What? Here's the thing, look at it, let me show you something. Okay, you're not, you're so not invited my bar mitzvah, bar mitzvah, fuck. I gotta switch, share this instead. All right, watch. I add review. You can at any time on Rodin Tomatoes, switch over from Rodin to Fresh. Once you put that score in, it's not set in stone. You can change it. I can change my poll quote even. I can make my own review disappear and I can make it something else. So this isn't something where you need like the poll of the editors at Rodin Tomatoes. You can just do it yourself. What a weird, so weird that they would say that. I guess this was 2018, 2019. Maybe that wasn't always the case on Rodin Tomatoes, but now it's easier than ever. If a studio is paying some of these people to give a positive review and they don't like what they said or they have a certain thing they want them to say, they can easily have them change it. You know, I got some shit for putting out another live video where I once in a while I'll do these The Fake Reviews Are In thing. I did it for Blue Beetle. I did it for the last MCU movie, whatever that was, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Quantum Shitium. I do them when I see these random reviews come in, these reviews come in on Twitter, the artist formerly known as Twitter, now X. They will all sound exactly the same. So-and-so is the Little Mermaid. So-and-so is Blue Beetle. This movie is all about Hispanic pride. And then the next comment, this movie is really about pride and the Hispanic family. Next comment. So-and-so is Blue Beetle. It's really about the Hispanic culture. Like, it's all the same. It's clear that they were given talking points from the studio. These are influencers who are getting paid to talk about the movie two or three weeks ahead of its release. They get merged. They get invited to the red carpet premiere. They get access. There's other forms that you can get paid. It doesn't need to be cash. It doesn't necessarily need to go on Ron Tomatoes as a positive review either. It can just be a tweet. I've been approached several times by different companies saying, we're going to send you this product. We want you to give it a positive, you know, we want you to do an ad. I had a company recently say, we want you to do an ad for this. Here's the talking points. And I emailed back. I'm like, do I get the product to test out first? Because I don't want to just blindly praise something without even testing the thing out. They never got back to me. This is why, by the way, I don't do many ads. It's not because nobody wants to do ads on the channel, which that would also be fair. But no, it's because when I do get them, they're typically not something that I want to even associate with the channel. They don't have any relevance to movies, or they're just not something I can get behind. So I just like, it's not worth my time to make like a hundred bucks or 300 bucks even to do like a 20 second ad for some fucking dumb thing that no one's heard of, or that they have heard of, but I haven't. I just, I'm trying to be as genuine and as humanly possible. And I want to just talk movies, you know, not the chic razor too. The writers of a negative review says that Bunker 15, I read all this stuff. Okay, so here we go. Here's the here's the rub. I also discovered another negative review of Ophelia from this period that was not counted by Rotten Tomatoes by a writer whose positive reviews of other Bunker 15 films had been recorded by the aggregator. Ophelia climbed the tomato meter to 62% flipping from Rotten to Fresh. The next month, the distributor IFC Films announced that it acquired Ophelia for release in the U S. What a ride. Ophelia's production company Covert Media didn't return requests for comment. Bunker 15's founder Daniel Harlow says, Wow, you are really reaching there and disagrees with the suggestion that his company buys reviews to skew Rotten Tomatoes. We have thousands of writers in our distribution list, distribution list, a small handful of setup specific system where filmmakers can sponsor or pay to have them review a film. Noted. The Ophelia Fair is a useful microcosm for understanding how Rotten Tomatoes, which turned 25 in August, holy God, I'm old. 25 year old site has come to function. The site was conceived in the early days of the web as a hot or not for movies. Now it can make or break them with implications for how films are perceived released marketed and possibly even green lit. The Tomato Meter may be the most important metric in entertainment yet it's also erratic, reductive and easily hacked. The studios didn't invent Rotten Tomatoes and most of them don't like it, says the filmmaker Paul Schrader. But the system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don't go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can gain. So they do. So the implication here, the implication here is that Rotten Tomatoes is somehow gaming the system, but from, so are they saying that this studio, whatever, paid Rotten Tomatoes to change the reviews? Because that's not what I don't see any proof of that. Listen, I have no doubt that Disney and some of these other studios are giving early access treatment to critics to give them nice reviews. I have no doubt that they have an influencer program that's set up for influencers to say the specific lines that they want. It's marketing. That's what they will do. They will absolutely do that. Is it disingenuous? Yeah, it is. But they will do it. And they are doing it. What I don't know and is yet to be made clear to me is if Rotten Tomatoes is taking money from Disney or other companies to change the aggregate or change reviews or add fake reviews, that stuff has to be proven. Otherwise, it's hearsay and it's bullshit. I'm not saying it's not happening, but there's got to be more proof than some studio from 19, whatever, or 20, whatever this was, 2018, paid for six or seven reviews to change some Ophelia? Who gives a shit about Ophelia? Okay. Okay, here we go. To filmmakers, okay, let's get back to where we were. Well, Mike Hunt in the mix. $2 Super Chat. But why ML Models? Exactly, Mike. It's a conspiracy theory. We should probably get David DeCovney on the horn and see if he can solve this. My nose is itching like crazy. Oh my God. It's like bothering me. Something's in the air right now. Okay, let's get back to this. This is a lot of reading for me. I don't like this. Okay, in a recent interview, Quentin Tarantino, whose next film is reportedly called The Movie Critic, admitted that he is no, that he no longer reads critics work. Today, I don't know anymore. Oh wait, he said, today, I don't know anyone. Today, I don't know anyone. He said, in a translation of his remarks, I'm told, Manola Dargis, she's excellent. But when I, I probably butchered that name. But when I asked what are the three movies she loved and the three she hated in the last few years, no one can answer me because they don't care. I'm okay. That is such a broad over generalization of movie critics. What? Maybe he's talking about the cream of the crop movie critic, which there are a select few, like maybe he's having like a Ciskel and Ebert style. There are a lot of people that care, though, and they take their job or their hobby. I take it very serious. That's why I don't post all of my shit to Ron Tomatoes. I don't give a fresher rod into everything because I truly don't know where it should fit. And I don't want to, again, if I didn't make it clear. Let's get back to it. Let's get, let's go to something. Ron Tomatoes homepage. Let's see if anything stands out here as really, I don't even know what half these movies are. Oh God. It's a little more. Talk to me as a 90. Oh, God, talk to me as the worst title ever. I hate that title. It should be talk to the hand. Let's look at Mission Impossible, for instance, is that 96% on the tomato meter, the new mission impossible. I think majority of the people that watch this movie do not think it's the best in the franchise. I'm going to guess, though, it has one of the highest tomato meter scores. I mean, you can't get much higher than 96%. That does not mean that it's 96 out of 100 amazing. It's one of the greatest movies of all time. It just means that people liked it more than they didn't. And that's all it comes down to. People look at that number, though, and they think it's it's just like this testament to something being incredible. And that's where Ron Tomatoes will Ron Tomatoes will never get over that hump. And this is the Super Mario Brothers movie 59% and Rotten Tomatoes with a 95% audience score. What a dramatic difference that is. And Super Mario Brothers being a Rotten movie, even though I think it pretty much serves every single fan you can think of, of these the video games over the years, that's just kind of a laughable number, very laughable number. Okay, back to the article. All right, this is probably because Rotten Tomatoes with help from Yelp, Goodreads and countless other review aggregators has desensitized us to the opinions of individual critics. Once upon a time, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert turned the no budget documentary hoop dreams into a phenomenon using only their thumbs. But critical power like that has been replaced by the collective voice of the masses. A third of US adults say they check Rotten Tomatoes before going to the multiplex. And while movie ads used to tout the blurbage of Jeffrey Leons and Peter Travers, now they're more likely to boast that a film has been certified fresh. That's true. That's true. The filmmaker across the taste spectrum, Rotten Tomatoes is a scourge. Martin Scorsese says it reduces the director to a content manufacturer and the viewer to an unadventurous consumer. Brett Ratner, who, as we all know, is pretty much top tier as a director, has called it the destruction of our business. That's very, very dramatic, Brett. But insiders acknowledged that it has become a crucial arbiter. I was hoping it said crucible because it's such a cool word. A crucial arbiter, publicists say that their jobs revolve around the site. In the last 10 years, says one, it's become much more important as so many of the most trusted critics have retired without replacements. Studios are so scared of what the tomato meter might say that some work with a company called Screen Engine, which attempts to forecast scores. According to the studios that predictions are very close, I'll refer to these informers who asked for a nominee. I don't care about any of this. So, yeah, Rotten Tomatoes is important. Water is wet. The sky is blue. Women have secrets. Who gives a fuck? Or is it who gives a shit? It's From the Last Boy Scout, an awesome action movie from the 90s. If a review straddles positive and negative too bad, I read some reviews of my own films where the writer might say that he doesn't think that I pull something off. But boy, is it interesting in the way that I don't pull it off? Says Schrader, a former critic. To me, that's a good review. But it would count as a negative on Rotten Tomatoes. Yeah, that's the binary zero and one. It's not good. It's really not good. All right, let's see what we got here. For example, in February, the tomato meter score for Ant-Man and the Wasquantimania debuted at 79% based on the first batch of reviews. Days later, after more movie critics had weighed in, it's rating sank into the 40s. Yes, this is another big thing. And this is what I was pointing out about, you are so not invited to my bat mitzvah. There was only, what did I say, 70 reviews on there, 77? That is laughably low for a movie like that. That's a big thing on Netflix. Most movie, like let's just look, for instance, at how many Mission Impossible has or Super Mario, how many Super Mario have? 276 reviews. How about Maverick? 476 reviews. How about Barbie? 465 reviews. So yes, 70 some reviews is very low for a Netflix exclusive movie. And that's why you see the numbers so high as more people jump into the pool. That number really only can go down when you're in the 90s. I mean, that's just math. That's just basic math. Oh, I forgot to share the screen. I apologize. Sorry, you didn't know what I was doing, but I was looking at stuff. Oh, we got a super chat from Jan for $3. Thank you, Jan. Hey, Adam, any fun plans for the weekend? I'm going to be just looking at Rotten Tomatoes scores and like putting out charts and schematics and rubber bands and maps and trying to figure out who are the real critics and who are the fake ones and what studios are paying who off and how much it's going to be awesome. Now, I think we are going to tour. There's like in South Carolina they have a, what can I think of the name? What are the ships called that the jets fly off of? What can I think of the name of it? A cruiser, whatever those submarine ships, whatever those are called. We're going to tour one. I've already toured it. Clearly, I got no education from it. An aircraft carrier, I believe is what they're called. We're going to tour an aircraft carrier. That'll eat up a couple hours with the family. We'll probably hang out down on the island for a while and then maybe get some dinner and have a day of it. And then I have a whole bunch of reviews to edit and to shoot. There's no rest for the Wicked Jam. Hope you guys are doing something fun as well. Okay. Thank you for the super chat. Okay. So what do we got here? Yeah. My point is also there should almost be a benchmark as to when rod and tomatoes can even release the fresh or rod and review because freaking stupid ass X slash Twitter, you have these influencers that will obnoxiously come out and tout the 100% on the tomato meter and you'll look and there'll be like five reviews in that are clearly by the people that we're going to like the movie because they got wind and dined early by the studio. So like, oh my God, Blue Beatles at 99% fresh. And you'll see there's like seven reviews in and then an hour later, they'll be like, it's still holding strong at 97% and there'll be like 12 reviews in hours and hours. They just get this kind of marketing push as they get to hype people up like look how good this movie is because the tomato meter has it so high and they just fail to leave out the fact that there's barely any reviews out there. In the studio's defense, Ron Tomatoes hastiness in computing its scores has made it practically necessary to cork one's bat, whatever that means. In a strategic blunder in May, Disney held the first screening of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at Keynes, the world's snootyest film festival from which the first 12 reviews begot an initial score of 33%. What they should have done, says publicist one, was have simultaneous screenings in the states for critics who might have been more friendly. A month and a half later, Dial of Destiny bombed at the box office even though friendly critics eventually lifted its rating to 69% hot. They had a little Ron Tomatoes score just sitting out there for six weeks. Yep, and it was all over. Everybody was like tweeting it and then going on TikTok and all that crap. For smaller movies, the opposite is more common at film festivals where critics tend to get swept up in the glamour. Yeah, I can remember a large chunk of people last year became subscribers because I watched Barbarian and hated the living hell out of it. And that movie was sitting in the 90% range, I think, on Ron Tomatoes. I don't know where it's at now. But man, that was filmed early, 824 hype, all these Keynes critics were just eating this shit up. And they propped that movie a lot of people saw it based on word of mouth from Ron Tomatoes. And that's another one where I guarantee the audience score is lower than the reviewer score of Barbarian. Yeah, 93%. 93% on the tomato meter and 71% from audience. I'm honestly surprised it's even at 71% by audience. Okay, let's see if there's any other gems in here. Naturally, studios have learned to exploit this dynamic. Publicist number one recalls working on a 2022 title that premiered to a claim at a festival a few months before its release. I wanted to screen it more widely, but the movie had a 100. And the studio didn't want to damage that because they wanted to use the 100% graphic. Yeah, yep. Let's get a little larger. Okay, what do we got? All of this would be one thing if Ron Tomatoes were merely an innocent relic from Web 1.0. But the site has come a long way from its founding in 1998. I don't care about any of this. That 2016 Warner Brothers sold most of its Fandango or sold most of its Fandango. Yeah, Fandango and Ron Tomatoes are one and the same, which shares a parent company with Universal Pictures. If it sounds like a conflict of interest for a movie review aggregator to be owned by two companies that make movies, and another that sells tickets, it probably is. Which is funny because people are always like Captain Marvel's reviews are paid by Disney, but Disney's not in charge. I don't think of Ron Tomatoes. Before the acquisition, Fandango had its own five star rating scale on its app and the website under which it was almost impossible for a movie review to receive fewer than three stars. Since then, even the ostensibly well intention changes it has made to Ron Tomatoes have seemed to produce score boosting side effects. Ron Tomatoes allows users to rate movies alongside critics and three years after Fandango deal, it changed the way these audience scores were calculated. Misogynist trolls had hijacked the platform, coordinating to tank women led movies like Captain Marvel before they opened. As a fix for user reviews to count, they would need to verify that they bought tickets, which they could do most easily by purchasing them via Fandango. Yes, there are definitely trolls on IMDB and Ron Tomatoes that review bomb. This isn't a secret either. I don't understand it. I think it's like the saddest shit someone can do with their time. Go and review bomb a movie based on whatever you want. It's just sad. What else do we got here? A bigger change? Yes? Hello? Someone's yelling. Hang on a second. My wife just came down and said wrap up the reading. I guess she's watching and she's not interested. So if you don't like the reading, which is the whole stream, that's what the point was, then you can thank my wife. And if you did like the reading, then you can dislike her. My con for $2 says Roadhouse. Swayzy, baby. We're almost done, I think. Oh my God, maybe we're not. Holy God, we're not almost done. We're just going to scale down a little bit. I'll go through it and see if there's any other major things to pull from this. We'll read the last paragraph. What this suggests is that viewers may have developed their own formulas for choosing movies in which tomato meter scores are just one important variable. If there was a new film by, I don't know, Klaus von blah, blah, blah. And he had a three hour drama about a housewife in middle ages. Do you think people would go see it? This is nonsense. All right. The takeaway here is that there's a business for everything, especially in 2023. People are going to find ways to utilize different marketing strategies. You have TikTok influencers, you have Twitter, X influencers, and of course, Rotten Tomatoes is just another large way for people to pay critics to get good reviews out there. I do think a large majority of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes genuinely want to give reviews that are honest, but there are some really, really sketchy snakes in the grass that show up from time to time and ruin it. And those are my thoughts. I try to be honest. That's all you can do is find people that at least align with your tastes and go from there. At the end of the day, you should always just make up your own mind. If a movie looks interesting to you, don't let someone sour you from going to it. I think that's pretty straightforward advice that everybody can use. All right. I'm done. I'm wrapping up. If you have any questions for me, now is the time. I'll stick around for a few minutes, see if any more super chats come in. Otherwise, it's Friday. It's Friday and I intend to get some sleep because that's what you do when you're middle age. You sleep. Perm for $5. Thank you, Perm, for the super chat. Sup, Adam. What's your favorite food? A little personal perm. I don't think I can... I have a few favorite foods, Perm. I really like a good bacon cheeseburger. I am GF. I am glued and free, though, for the most part. I try to avoid because it's just... I'm pretty sure I have celiacs undiagnosed, but my mom has it and it's in the genes. It's in our blood. So I try to avoid celiac and that seems to work. I try to avoid celiac. I try to avoid glued and that seems to play well with my body type. I like a good bacon cheeseburger, but I have to tell you the gluten-free buns are not ideal. And that's definitely soured the experience over the years. A slice of pizza goes a long way for me. I'm a simple man. I like simple things. Punch pizza in Minnesota was one of my favorite pizza places. GF is, of course, a problem with pizza, but the cauliflower crust, I think, is pretty solid. It's come a long way. I don't have that one great meal that I just think, man, if I could just have that for the rest of my life, I'd be good. I'm a man of many tastes. I like a lot of different flavors. I think variety is the spice of life. I've said that many times and I'll stand by it. But yeah, I am also kind of meat and potatoes. So a nice steak with mashed potatoes works wonders for me. A great slice of pizza, a great bacon cheeseburger with some lettuce, a fresh cut tomato, throw some ketchup and mustard on there. You can put some onion and pickle. I had one from Granite City, which I don't think they would have that great of a burger that I was really floored with because it had everything on it that I just said, but they also then put cold sprinkled cheese on top. So you had the sliced cheese. You had your other proteins and whatnot. And then you had sprinkled cheese plus the bun. And I thought that was a treat. I like a good buffalo wing as well. Thank you, Perm. Hack the movies. Tony's in the house. $5 Super Chat. Of course, Tony, anytime you're going to show up and give me a Super Chat, I'm going to push your channel, which I know that's part of the fun. Check out Hack the Movies on YouTube. Tony's a great guy. He's one of my best friends online. I still haven't met him in person, but I feel like I've kind of known him for years now. I've been on his show several times. I go on at least once a month to do the monthly recap. That's fun because how that works is Tony will review all the popular movies that come out for the month with other guests that aren't me. And then he'll have me on for like the shitty straight to streaming Netflix movies that are nine times out of 10 terrible. And so I come on there like the Grinch that stole Christmas every time and talk about five movies that no one's heard of and are complete dirt. And then his audience is like, oh, what a surprise. Adam didn't like the movie. He doesn't like anything. He sucks. It's fun. And we continue to do this. It's a fun time. Thank you, Tony. He says, if I listened to critics, I would have never watched Howling 7. Tony's a huge fan of the Howling franchise, too. He celebrates the entire catalog. Mike Hunt's back, baby. $5 Super Chat. What's the most masculine movie? Rambo, Predator, or Roadhouse? I mean, I was going to say anything with Jean-Claude Van Damme, who I see as a skin in Mortal Combat 1. That's pretty awesome. He's a Johnny Cage skin. You can play as Jean-Claude JCVD in his Bloodsport persona. I think that I was going to say Rocky is the most masculine, although Rambo is Rambo's pretty balls to the wall. But Rocky, I feel like, I mean, the guys, the guys fighting giant Russians, he's taken out Clubber Lane. I mean, this guy's knocking down. He goes up against Hulk, Hulk Kogan. Is that right? Hulk Hogan? Yeah, Hulk Hogan, the wrestler, back in the day. Yeah, I think I'd go with Rocky Balboa. I mean, you could really say sliced alone in general is kind of your man's man, as far as masculinity goes. The guy sweats it, he oozes it. Thank you, Mike. Shadow Humor for $5. Thank you, Shadow Humor. Always nice when you show up. Woke is so overused. How's the stream? Keep up the good stuff, Adam. Did I say Woke? I don't ever say that stupid term. And yeah, it's of course overused. It's actually banned from my channel. It's overused because you can actually go into YouTube and put key terms in that you don't ever want to see show up. So it'll automatically like throw the comment into the spam folder for approval, which I never do. And Woke was definitely one of them. Pito and a couple other ones had to be put in after the Sound of Freedom review came on. And I was called a pedo in all sorts of names because I thought the movie was mediocre. So naturally, the inclination people have is to call you some of the worst things in the world because you just didn't like a movie they did. It's such a healthy thing we have here on the internet. Yeah, Woke is terrible. It doesn't mean anything. And yet it means everything at the same time. Essentially, what it boils down to is if you have a message that you're trying to convey in a film that doesn't align with a group of people, it's Woke. It's really what it comes down to, whether it's the patriarchy, whether it's a gay character, a person of color, a woman being propped up. Like, it's all woke all the time. It's really funny because I just watched, I mentioned at the beginning of the stream Down with Love. And if that movie came out today, oh my God, it would be called like Down with Woke or Woke with Love. The movie is basically Barbie on steroids. This movie is all about the patriarchy. It's all about a woman's place and how hard it is to work and operate in a man's world. It was actually a very fun movie. I have the review coming out. I enjoyed it. But I also don't get worked up over dumb shit like that. It's a movie. It's telling a story. It has a message. Watch it. Don't watch it. Move on. You're going to be fine. There's plenty of John Wick movies still being made. There's plenty of Jurassic World movies coming out where the biggest insult to that is the killer locusts taken over the screen. There's no shortage of stupid movies with no commentary at all. I know people get really worked up about Disney having all these agendas and stuff, but come on. You're a middle-aged dude. Do you really care about the little mermaid at the end of the day? Is that a movie that you were really clamoring for? You have the original from when you were 12. It's animated. It holds up, I guess, as fine as it could. Who the fuck is going out to watch it, though? It's silly. It's silly stuff all around. Thank you, Shadow Humor. If there's anybody else, speak up now or forever hold your peace. And by peace, I mean your private parts. I'll take a couple more drinks of Coke. Notice this background wallpaper is actually interactive. It's a Harry Potter theme. We have Hogwarts Castle in the back and it's gone from day to night. It's kind of on a little psycho thing. I didn't make it. It's credit to whatever this YouTube wallpaper is that I put up. I found it right before I went live on the stream and I was pretty captivated. Okay. What comes out next week? I'm going to look what comes out. If there's any more super chats, bring them in now. Otherwise, we're closing up shop right after I find out what comes out next week. Regal, coming soon. Taylor Swift, The Era's Tour. I don't know if I'm going to see that in theaters. Oh, that's in 35 days. Camp Hideout opens in seven days. I've never heard of this movie in my life. A Haunting in Venice. Oh my God. That's the... I just saw a trailer for this. This is part of that franchise with the investigator guy with the swirly mustache. And it's weird because this is like a straight horror film this time around. The Murder Mystery Who'd Done It. I think it's part of that thing. Let's see. Detective Once Again and Cover the Killer. Yeah, it doesn't say what the franchise is called. And I can't remember the name of either the other. Murder on the Nile or whatever was the last one. And the one before that was on the train. The train one was decent. I couldn't even get through the Nile movie. It was so bad. We have a Paw Patrol movie. The Mighty Movie. It comes on 21 days. I don't think I'll see that. The Creator is in 21 days. That looks interesting. The Expendables is in 14 days. It lives inside. I already saw and put out a short. Not very good. And there's a Monday Mystery Movie. Those are always terrible. Okay, so I guess A Haunting in Venice is going to be the movie I see next week. I don't know what Camp Hideout is. Some indie shit. Sorry, Christopher Lloyd. Amanda Leiden. Okay, weird. Whatever. Okay, we're gonna end with this final... Oh, we got two more Super Chats came in right at the end at Hail Mary here. The flail for $2 says Cheers, Adam. Cheers, flail. Thank you. And Shadow Humor is gonna close the night strong with the $20 beautiful Super Chat. Because it's Friday, you're a funny motherfucker, Adam, underrated. I appreciate that, sir. I appreciate that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, everybody for watching. Like I said, it's Friday. I hope you guys have a wonderful weekend. I'm gonna be busy hanging out with the family, doing some filming, watching some movies. Hopefully one or two of them are good. Upcoming roasts. Not only do I have... What is it called? Van Helsing on the agenda. I also have showgirls. Matthew, buddy of mine. He paid me to roast showgirls. I already reviewed it for him, but he wants the full roast treatment, which means I now have to meticulously go through and rate a script for that pile of shit. That'll be very fun. Those are two upcoming roasts. I have another one for Street Fighter. So we got some good... Speaking of John Claude Van Damme, we have Street Fighter roast coming out. So three roasts that I'm very excited to do. It'll be a good time. Thanks again. Have a great weekend and we will see you tomorrow for the review of the Nun 2. Take care.