Fake news is everywhere, even the movies!

Tweet

American talk show king Johnny Carson once made a live monologue joke that toilet paper was running out and Americans need to prepare. Being Americans they believed it and mass panic in stores ensued, meaning intelligent people who didn’t believe it and Knew it was a joke then had to follow suit or go without toilet paper. This is at the heart of Fake News. Stupid people are more likely to believe it as they don’t question it. It’s what they believe and so want it to be true. Although the internet is the weapon to spread fake news it’s also the best way to check it. There really is no excuse. The movie review website rottentomatoes.com has been caught up in the fake news debate of late as fans and bots increasingly try to influence ratings of the films on sites like this and Imdb.com and metacractic.com etc by heavy rating one way. Fanboy’s of comic books are notorious for rating down comic book movies if they stray too far from the original comic book storylines and characters, Justice League, Suicide Squad and Batman V Superman particularly hard it. But its rottentomatoes.com that has the greatest influence on people’s choices on what to watch at the cinema or on movie packages or DVD and they, too, are being questioned. We all know film critics tend to be from the same social class of the filmmakers and so there idea of a good fun movie is not always ours. But, of late, some film companies are ‘buying’ positive rates from South East Asia ‘like factories’ to flood these websites to make sure they have a decent opening weekend so the film doesn’t tank. Rottentomatoes.com is actually owned by just two entertainment conglomerates who are linked to two of the biggest Hollywood studios and recently the early critic reviews and ratings were not listed on that site for the film The Justice League, some say because they were so low, a film made by the studios who part own the website. Rottentomatoes.com denied that they pulled the aggregated rating to help it have a big opening weekend and claimed to be wholly independent. Its 47% tomato splat did eventually appear and currently sits at 40%. I watched Batman V Superman and Suicide Squad and thought they were perfectly fine so expect Justice League to be far better than 40% critic’s approval. But just as the public rating system can be skewed by various pressure groups so can critics who, like I say, can write down a movie for all manner of reasons. Some are pressured by their newspaper employers to be nice about a car wreck of a movie as the paper is owned by the same entertainment complex of the actual filmmakers. Other film reviewers simply take ‘promotional rewards’ to big up a movie. Either way you need to look at multiple movie rating sites to form an opinion, what I do. https://www.moviequotesandmore.com/movie-reviews/