If Hollywood wasn’t already frustrated with Rotten Tomatoes, let’s see what happens now that it’s bringing its controversial movie and TV scores to Facebook.
The movie-review aggregator, which sees itself as the thumbs up or thumbs down of the entertainment world, is premiering a new series on Facebook’s video hub, Watch—which lives outside your normal news feed—where it will talk about popular movies and shows and drop new Tomatometer scores, Variety reported. The show, See It/Skip It, will be hosted by a US film critic, Jacqueline Coley of Black Girl Nerds, and entertainment commentator Segun Oduolowu. It premieres on Nov. 1, with new episodes rolling out Thursdays at midnight New York time.
Audiences like Rotten Tomatoes because it allows them to easily take the temperature on releases. But the site became the bane of the film industry this year when producers and filmmakers started blaming it for big-budget flops like Baywatch and The Dark Tower that—let’s face it—audiences probably never wanted to begin with. Others have taken issue with Rotten Tomatoes’ oversimplified aggregation methodology that crams nuanced movie reviews into two camps—good or bad. Some studios tried to suppress the site’s supposed box-office impact over the summer by pulling back on reviews.
Rotten Tomatoes scores already appear on platforms like iTunes, Vudu, and the ticket-buying site Fandango, which bought Rotten Tomatoes’ parent company last year. (Fandango, by the way, is owned by movie studio NBCUniversal, and bought Rotten Tomatoes from another studio, Warner Bros.)
Still, Hollywood should at least be happy that the Rotten Tomatoes show prompts discussion around films and series and encourages a dialogue on social media, rather than just reducing titles to numbers.