The questions surrounding the box office performance of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice won’t go away, and now, Rotten Tomatoes is getting caught up in the postmortem.
Brett Ratner, whose company Ratpac Entertainment was one of the film’s backers, blames the film critic aggregation website for how Batman v Superman has been perceived. He described Rotten Tomatoes as “the destruction of our business” while speaking at the Sun Valley Film Festival over the weekend, Entertainment Weekly reports.
Ratner was sure to clarify that he has “such respect and admiration for film criticism.” That said, he doesn’t approve of the way the website turns critics’ responses into a number. In fact, he considers Rotten Tomatoes “the worst thing we have in today’s movie culture” and contended it “put a cloud” over Batman v Superman.
The director argued that people look at a low number and decide not to see a film, not understanding that the score doesn’t tell the whole story.
“That number is an aggregate and one that nobody can figure out exactly what it means, and it’s not always correct,” Ratner said. “I’ve seen some great movies with really abysmal Rotten Tomatoes scores. What’s sad is film criticism has disappeared. It’s really sad.”
He highlighted how Batman v Superman was very successful, which is true from a financial standpoint. The Zack Snyder-directed film grossed more than $872 million worldwide — well over its budget of $250 million, according to Box Office Mojo data. In spite of that, it was seen as having failed to live up to its potential, certainly not helped by its low Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (27 percent).
At the same time, there are other reasons why Batman v Superman was perceived as a disappointment that Ratner seems not to have considered. One big factor was that it followed in the wake of Deadpool, making comparisons inevitable. The offbeat superhero flick — even with its ‘R’ rating and more obscure protagonist — brought in $783.11 million on a budget of just $58 million. On top of that, its Tomatometer and audience scores both far exceed those of Batman v Superman (84 and 90 percent, compared to 27 and 63 percent).
Sticking to Ratner’s complaints, though, yes, many fans do use Rotten Tomatoes to decide how they want to spend their dollars at the box office. That is exactly what the tool is meant for. The company’s vice president, Jeff Voris, explained as much in a statement to EW.
“At Rotten Tomatoes, we completely agree that film criticism is valuable and important, and we’re making it easier than it has ever been for fans to access potentially hundreds of professional reviews for a given film or TV show in one place,” he wrote. “The Tomatometer score, which is the percentage of positive reviews published by professional critics, has become a useful decision-making tool for fans, but we believe it’s just a starting point for them to begin discussing, debating and sharing their own opinions.”
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?