Melania drops 67% at US box office as Rotten Tomatoes defends record-breaking audience scores

I saw a clip of...maybe Jordan Klepper...interviewing people going into a showing. All of them just full-on fan-girl with anticipation, and completely upside down from the entire rest of the world. All older white people, fancy dress, clearly wealthy; might have been a premier.

It left me thinking that someone should follow some of these people around for a while to see where their special reality comes from. Study them, like Jane Goodall with the apes.

Buying a ticket and actually watching the movie are two different things. For all we know all those that "bought" a ticket and left a review are all the military personnel that were ordered to go see it and probably were ordered to leave a glowing review.

The only people buying tickets for this are maga morons, so this makes sense.

it makes sesnse though. Anyone paying to see it is probably MAGA anyway, so of course they’re going to rate it highly.

i doubt very many non MAGA types have seen it, so there will be very few negative reviews for that reason alone.

Maybe I don't understand that site, but you click on the 99% rating and you get a list of reviews that shows 20 rotten, 2 fresh. Just a bad look imo.

I'm not convinced there's a conspiracy here. Seems entirely likely that Rotten Tomatoes has no contingency for the release of a movie so blatantly sycophantic and propagandistic that the only people spending money on tickets are those who are already bought into the fantasy.

and bots.

and when you look at who owns the sites, you have to also throw in the very real possibility of manipulation of the data itself from within, too.

Exactly, and it doesn't mean that Rotten Tomatoes is somehow involved in the review manipulation. It is obviously possible for an external party to influence the audience score, they just need enough money to buy tickets that can verify. It's probably a much easier way than pressuring RT to manipulate the reviews if you have the money (and maybe even an interest in funneling that money into movie earnings)

That most people wouldn't even think of buying a ticket and thus can't post a review almost definitely plays a part as well.

I'd watch a true story documentary on her life, I think that would be intriguing and unique. How many mail order brides find themselves in the white house, ya know? What happened in her life to get to that point? But this film is not that, only covering the month of January 2025.

We need tariffs on imported prostitutes, support the domestic sex worker industry!

^/s^ ^but^ ^kinda^ ^not^

Would an imported prostitute (not that there’s anything wrong with that) be given an Einstein visa?

They're not supposed to. It's just shameless bribery. I bet the whole thing is just about DJT from her POV anyway.

Wow, or we could drop the misogyny and just dislike her for being part of a fascist dynasty. No need to berate sex workers, either.

RT looking almost as bad as RT.

They've been obvious shills for at least a decade. All you have to do is look at any new release. They rarely get below 80/90%. Every single fucking movie can't be the citizen Kane they claim it is.

Conservatives are bootlicking morons.

what is the deal with your neighbour?

0% chance that's legit.

Its actually wild seeing the critic reviews sitting at 8% with the "verified user" score at 99%.

Usually they pay off both groups lol.

I came to that conclusion after paying money to see Brad pitt in F1 following 97% scores.

They took the exact plot of Stallone's Driven, to date the worst movie ever made about racing, or anything else.

For obvious propaganda pieces like this, that's how "Verified Audience" reviews will always be. In order to be counted you need to have purchased a ticket through one of RT's partners, so it's self-selecting. No sane person is going to buy a ticket to this bribe masquerading as a documentary, so it's only insane Republicans being counted towards that score.

You can select "All Audience" if you want to see everyone. It's at 29%, even after Republicans' review boosting campaign.

🤣 reeks of "I have a " fill in the blank racist stereotype "friend!"

RT owned by Fandango, mostly NBC. You might be thinking of IMDb where the film has been listed as #1 movie in america all week, with a 1.3/10 rating.

No, it’s owned by Fandango, which itself is mainly owned by Versant (formerly the NBCUniversal cable network business) and WBD.

Either bots or poor people from developing countries are paid to make positive comments of the movie.

My dude, critics just value different things than everyday audiences. When you watch movies for a living you become jaded and value uniqueness more than anything. General audiences care a whole lot less about uniqueness and just want something entertaining. That's why you get off the wall stuff with high critic ratings but low audience ratings, or fairly generic but entertaining stuff with low critic ratings but high audience ratings.

Just know how to read the scores and RT is still the most useful around. Critic score are uniqueness, cinematography, and potentially storytelling. Critics also like drama much more than the average person. Audience scores are for entertainment value. But you also need to take the scores in context of genres you like. If you love scifi and a movie has a 50% audience score, you'll probably enjoy it plenty. If you hate scifi it's probably not for you at all.

How is IMDb much more reliable? I'd argue that's even easier to manipulate as you don't need to buy a ticket to leave a review. Review bombing (in either direction) is pretty rampant on IMDB.