A.V. Club: Warner Bros. Now Owns Film Review Site Rotten Tomatoes

Consensus data is most often the best indicator of public opinion, which is why sites like RottenTomatoes.com and Metacritic.com are so valuable to the film and music industries. However, it seems Rotten Tomatoes might just have landed under control of Warner Brothers, signaling a significant conflict of interests. A.V. Club has the story…

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And that’s all well and good—success attracts success, and branding initiatives and so forth—except for the deal also includes Rotten Tomatoes, the popular film review aggregator site whose staff collects disparate critical opinions, then uses their sometimes-murky internal matrix (a combination of objective mathematics and subjective editorial decisions) to assign the all-important “Fresh” and “Rotten” ratings that let you know whether a film like, say, the new Warner Bros. release Something Borrowed is worth checking out. But of course, Warner Bros. has offered assurances that Rotten Tomatoes will continue to operate completely independently, and that the acquisition of a film review site by a major movie studio is nothing to worry about. After all, hasn’t vertical integration always worked out to everyone’s benefit?…

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Click through for the whole story…