“A lot of times, it’s harder for us—or at least for me—sometimes to know what you’re capable of when you’ve been pigeonholed.”
—Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, tearfully working to reinvent his image at the Venice premiere of The Smashing Machine, painting himself as a victim of Hollywood stereotyping rather than the calculating career architect that everyone knows he is.

A little more on this…: Seriously, could you smell what The Rock was cooking at Venice? Amazing stuff. This is the same guy who empowered Ari Emanuel to get him extraordinary paydays on literally dozens of full-freight studio extravaganzas, regardless of filmmaker or quality. Since 2010, he’s reeled off an all-time run, including Jungle Cruise, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Rampage, Red Notice, San Andreas, Journey 2, Tooth Fairy, Central Intelligence, two Jumanjis, multiple Fast & Furiouses, and, most recently, Red One. This is the guy who tried to leverage Black Adam into taking over the entire DC Comics franchise. No shame—it’s show business. But now we’re told to forget all that? He’s a slimmed-down A24 artiste (in glasses!) who has finally “overcome” the scourge of Hollywood stereotyping?? It’s gonna be a looooong awards season…

Still more…: This is basically the same playbook that A24 ran successfully with Brendan Fraser and The Whale, which also launched with tears at Venice. Johnson has worked with more voters than Fraser had, but Fraser had done prestige work in Gods and Monsters and Crash. And remember, A24 came up short with a similar he’s-an-actor-now campaign for Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems. Let’s see if the Netflix machine can push Sandler to a nomination for Jay Kelly; they cajoled him into a tux at Venice, though it was probably a miss to let him on the carpet without glasses. Regardless, the Academy is likely thrilled to have two legit movie stars (plus Leo? And Michael B.? And Timmy?) in the Oscar race.

Even more…: Can Johnson stop Disney from Norbit-ing him with the live-action Moana? The remake is set for next summer, so a trailer will likely appear in front of Avatar: Fire and Ash in the heart of awards season. Maybe Johnson can delay it until January 16, the end of Oscar voting, though if I were running the Disney awards campaigns, I’d deploy it strategically to remind everyone that Johnson has been a paycheck actor in dreck for 20 years, thus boosting Jeremy Allen White in the Springsteen movie.

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Shh, don’t tell anyone, but none of the movies that just premiered at Venice or Telluride really killed it. Not in the way that films in past years have announced themselves as the clear contenders to beat at the Oscars. Not if you’re reading the tea leaves closely and parsing the polite puffery or talking to the very few awards season veterans who have no material interest in the reactions to, or the best picture trajectories of, the films in question.

All this despite a steady cacophony of public praise coming out of the two highest-profile awards season launch pads. Indeed, if you looked at the initial reviews and press reactions for movies like Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly or Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet or Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, they’re downright euphoric. Historic, even! Rotten Tomatoes scores at, or near, 100 percent! Impressive stopwatch counts on premiere ovations!

But it’s all kinda become B.S. noise, a victim of the overall praise inflation that has terminally afflicted late-stage Hollywood. Nobody believes the festival hype anymore because it’s all become just hype, and everyone seems to be in on the grift—from the media outlets seeking clicks to the journalists coveting access to the review aggregators chasing engagement. At the center of it all is Rotten Tomatoes, which is simultaneously the most influential arbiter of quality in the movie business and a misleading mess. How did that happen?

At this point, most savvy moviegoers kinda know Rotten Tomatoes has been diluted and corrupted to the verge of incoherence. Owned since 2016 by Universal and Warner Bros., the site and its binary grading system—reviews are categorized as either a tomato or a splatter, with no room for nuance—have always infuriated filmmakers and disserved users. But lately, studios have become even more aggressive in gaming the scores, both by strategically embargoing reactions and formal reviews, and doing their best to empower the writers whose opinions tend to serve their interests. (It’s always hilarious to see the effusive praise of a mediocre movie from people invited to a splashy premiere dutifully aggregated by the media, followed the next day by a steaming crap sandwich from actual critics whom the studio doesn’t control—often at those same media outlets.)

It helps that the “Certified Fresh” rating is often generated by only a handful of reviews at echo chambers of enthusiasm like Sundance or Venice. Social media aggregator accounts with large followings then pick up the early high scores as gospel, creating a false narrative of extreme quality. Recently, The Smashing Machine went viral with a “debut” score of 100 percent Fresh out of Venice, but it was quickly knocked down to 84 percent and falling, even before most of the mainstream critics have had a crack at it. That’s a strategy, not an accident.

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Perhaps most egregious, the site now aggregates the actual critics alongside dozens of random awards pundits, fan accounts, and Substackers with opaque credentials or agendas, minimizing the influence of career writers who bring experience, transparency, and oversight from editors. Some argue this is an overdue democratization of the critical elites, which until recently were largely white and male and dismissive of the kind of popcorn fare that average audiences prefer. I get that. The reality is that the professional critic is a dying breed—many once-influential outlets, like The Chicago Tribune and Vanity Fair, recently eliminated their critic positions precisely because opinion has become ubiquitous online. But the result is pretty obvious: Rotten Tomatoes has become a steaming tar pit of random takes, agenda-driven awards punditry, and press junket fluff, largely indistinguishable from the social media morass it purports to float above.

Plus, the whole thing is vulnerable to outright fraud. Studios can complain and get ratings switched if a lukewarm review is deemed inappropriately negative. Two years ago, New York reported on the P.R. firms that recruited little-known “critics” and paid them to write or change reviews that boosted RT scores. One film was elevated from Rotten (46 percent) to Fresh (62 percent) after the manipulation. It’s all very gross.

And yet… Rotten Tomatoes somehow remains the industry standard for judging the quality of movies. It’s kinda nuts. No individual critic matters anymore, only the “Certified Fresh” score, which studios splay across TV and digital ads like a stamp of widespread approval. Kevin Goetz, the test-screening guru, now forecasts RT scores for upcoming movies—which makes sense because they can make or break a release plan. It’s a fake metric of quality that has become a real metric only because Hollywood collectively decided to buy in. Like, say, the Golden Globes.

That buy-in has led to pretty remarkable grade inflation that doesn’t get talked about enough. After flinching at some of the recent Tomatometer scores, I asked Puck’s researcher, Maya Tribbitt, to aggregate all the studio-wide releases in both 2014 and 2024. Not surprisingly, the average RT score spiked about 13 percent over that period. Were the movies just better last year than a decade prior?

Doubtful. That argument might make sense for the audience score because studios now must clear a higher populist bar to justify a theatrical release. But we’re talking about critics here, or what qualifies as critics these days. By comparison, look at the scores for the same set of movies on Metacritic, the rival aggregator site that assigns a numerical value to each review and thus provides a more nuanced aggregate score. The overall scores went up in that period too, but only by 5 percent.

So grade inflation is an overall problem, but it’s a bigger problem at Rotten Tomatoes. I’d argue the awards industrial complex has a lot to do with it, especially this time of year. The rise of the awards journalist goes all the way back to the ’90s, when the first generation of bloggers appeared to chronicle the Oscars season—and, in many cases, to suck up to the campaigns. The trades and other media outlets that covered Hollywood realized they couldn’t really influence the critics, who often rained on the carefully orchestrated studio awards campaign parades, jeopardizing access to talent and advertising budgets while providing a real service to readers. When I was running The Hollywood Reporter, our reader surveys consistently showed that our actual reviews by real critics—not the awards content—were valued most by awards voters.

But the publishers instead empowered the awards pundits, a new category of quasi-critics who would evaluate movies’ awards prospects rather than actually review them—which, of course, entailed judging the quality of the film, but from a less, uh, rigorous perspective. It was a semantic distinction, but an important (and lucrative) one that has led to big changes in the entertainment media landscape.

The real critics hated these awards people, but the studios loved them because they required access—to early screenings, to talent for their interviews, to parties for their coverage of the season—and could thus be influenced. Failing to toe the party line on a movie that the studio had deemed a priority would result in ostracization. As an added bonus, these awards pundits were then invited to moderate Q&As with talent after screenings and at tribute events, services for which the pundits demanded their own fees.

Not everyone takes the fees, and there are some great journalists who cover Oscar season, but there’s an ickiness to the entire economy of the season. And at a certain point, the critics and the pundits started to blur—or at least they have at Rotten Tomatoes. If you look at the list of critics, it’s a lot of writers for outlets like Awards Circuit or AwardsBuzz or Next Best Picture, many of whom are auditioning for access to talent via their reviews. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is currently sitting at 100 percent Fresh from 13 reviews out of Telluride, mostly from outlets dedicated to awards. Again, a strategy, not an accident.

Someone like Pete Hammond at Deadline can conduct dozens of softball Q&As with studio talent during film and TV awards seasons, then call himself a critic for the purpose of reviewing those same movies and shows. And Hammond is then aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes with the same weight as a critic at The New York Times. Everyone wins: The studios get the fawning reviews and awards analysis they need to position their movies to voters, the pundits get paid, the outlets that employ them are rewarded with large advertising buys, and Rotten Tomatoes gets a steady stream of reviews to aggregate. The only ones who lose are the actual consumers of the media because they are served a constant diet of fluff and spin.

This culture of positivity isn’t particularly new, or unique to Hollywood. Kelefah Sanneh lamented in this week’s New Yorker that critics in general have become too nice these days. Sanneh focused on the music world, but the economic incentives, and the fear of triggering stars or their fans online apply equally to film and TV critics.

It’s a bummer, but does any of this actually matter? Depends who you are. Hollywood is nothing if not marketing and spin, so the stakes here are admittedly low for people who are savvy enough to see through the B.S. Personally, I go to Metacritic for at least a more accurate assessment of movies, and I’ve vowed to stop citing Rotten Tomatoes. Beyond that, the real issue is that the consumers lose. At a time when everyone is suspicious of the media and Hollywood, the industry’s biggest arbiter of quality is indeed rigged, providing the critical assessment that Hollywood wants rather than the one it needs.

See you Monday,
Matt

Maya Tribbitt contributed research for today’s issue.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or Toronto restaurant recs? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.