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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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it looks like it has a whopping 99% Audience Score in Rotten Tomatoes

I find this so incredibly, laughably unlikely that going forward I think I will no longer be able to take the Rotten Tomatoes audience score seriously. Movies that have gotten a >90% Audience Score on RT are things like Apocalypse Now and Dark Knight, Blade Runner and Casablanca. There is not a single movie in the top 15 of the list of audience score over 90% on RT that I don't recognize the name of, and I am not a film buff. The first movie whose title I don't recognize is #30, Snatch, which appears to have been included by mistake as in tiny print at the bottom it says it's Audience Score is actually 74%.

For god's sake Star Wars only has a score of 92%. Star Wars. It's ridiculous in the extreme to assert that a mediocre piece of Culture War Oscar-bait has a 99%. Either I am completely, totally out of touch with the modern movie-goer, which I will concede is a possibility, or RT is manipulating the score of the movie. Considering that RT has been mucking about with their Audience Score formula/rules since at least 2019, it seems the more likely explanation is that RT's Audience Score is simply no longer a useful tool if the movie in question touches on the culture war.

I think certain movies are self-selected to get good reviews. It's why documentaries have almost always been very highly rated (throughout RTs lifecycle) even if they're not that good because the audience that would be willing to watch a documentary on a subject they don't have an interest in and also rate something poorly which affirmed their views is very low. I'd bet for a movie like this it's about the same sort of self-selection. People who can sense or an anticipate the presentism or pandering even just from the idea/poster/trailer are unlikely to see it and unlikely to review it. Also, RTs % system is based on if a movie is rated a 6 or higher, that's all. Every 100% RT movie could be straight 6/10 reviews across the board.

You read the first link wrong, Snatch is a 93% audience rating the 74% is for the critics rating. Just like Blade Runner has an 89% on that list because that's the critics' rating, the audience rating is 90%.

RT verified audience rating 99%, all-audience rating 85%, IMDB 6.2/10.