Movie horror: Attack of the killer tomatoes

Audiences can see through the attempted franchises that have no reason to exist such as The Mummy. Photo / AP

By Sonny Bunch

I was surprised to learn last week that the most powerful people in Hollywood were not named Weinstein, did not have the power to greenlight films, and didn't have Brad Pitt on speed dial.

No, the new Hollywood powerbrokers are a far simpler sort - you've probably never heard of most of them.

That's right: the critics who make up Rotten Tomatoes (RT) are the biggest, baddest villains Hollywood has cooked up since Darth Vader (and I'm one of them). And just like Alderaan before it, La La Land may soon be so much space dust.

At least, that's what the executives who talked to the New York Times' Brooks Barnes would have you believe. Sure, some of the movies were bad, a few execs were willing to admit. "But most studio fingers point toward the Rotten Tomatoes website, which boils down hundreds of reviews to give films 'fresh' or 'rotten' scores on its Tomatometer," Barnes reported.

Brett Ratner said last year that the review-aggregating site would be "the destruction of our business," and the biz's brightest lights seem to agree with the director of Rush Hour 3 and producer of Santa's Slay.

"Mr Ratner's sentiment was echoed almost daily in studio dining rooms all summer, although not for attribution, for fear of giving Rotten Tomatoes more credibility," Barnes wrote. "Over lunch last month, the chief executive of a major movie company looked me in the eye and declared that his mission was to destroy the review-aggregation site."

The Tomatometer is something like a hyperpowered version of a thumbs up/thumbs down rating system patented by two film critics, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, whose reviews also alarmed Hollywood in the 1980s.

Certainly the site, which drew more than 13.6 million visitors in May, has the power to destroy the hopes and dreams of wide-eyed dreamers working at studios who just want to provide audiences with a modicum of entertainment in the form of fivequels to Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean, right?

Well, no.

A study in Medium by Yves Bergquist, of USC's Entertainment Technology Centre demolished the idea that negative RT scores were hitting box office totals.

Bergquist found virtually no correlation between overall grosses and RT scores and an even lower correlation between RT scores and opening weekend figures.

The real reason for Hollywood's woes seems much simpler: Audiences are bored. This northern summer has been an endless river of sequels to franchises that should be dead (the aforementioned Transformers and Pirates movies; another Fast and Furious flick; another Alien movie) and the attempted birthing of franchises that have no reason to exist (The Mummy; Baywatch; Kong: Skull Island).

It's easy to blame Rotten Tomatoes. It's much harder to make a movie people want to see. No surprise, then, which tack the suits have taken.