When was rotten tomatoes founded

The founders sold the company for an undisclosed amount in to IGN Entertainment , which was acquired by News Corp. News Corp. Fandango, a unit of Comcast Corp. During its 19 years of existence, Rotten Tomatoes has expanded to include original content, offering rankings of superhero movies and horror flicks by Tomatometer rating and celebrity interviews. It also added TV reviews.

But prior owners struggled to grow the business, which generates revenue from advertising and by licensing its ratings and icons to digital video retailers including iTunes and pay-TV providers. Rotten Tomatoes hopes to produce more video and grow its live events operation. The company says it has half a dozen series in development. Its new Beverly Hills office, which it shares with Fandango, has spaces for shooting interviews and other shows.

Senior production director Eileen Rivera displayed plans for the new stage, which resembled a cozy bar. The idea started a few years ago as a small Comic-Con panel, but has since grown to include social media interaction and filmmaker guests. Lead photo: Rotten Tomatoes vice president Jeff Voris, middle, and senior editor Grae Drake, right, are filmed by creative director Jimmy Johenning at the new Beverly Hills offices of the review aggregation website.

Faughnder writes about Hollywood studios, including Walt Disney Co. Company Town. Film crew workers remain divided over new contract as voting begins. Explaining Hollywood: How to get a job as a gaffer. But it quickly picked up steam. A positive mention from Roger Ebert gave it a sense of credibility in the film community. With the Bay Area having so many Asian Americans living there, it was built out of a reflection and desire of representation.

Soon after, the tech bubble burst. At that point, Lee ended up moving out of his home and sleeping in his cubicle , literally hiding clothes in his desk drawers. After weathering the next few years, Duong and his co-founders sold the site to IGN Entertainment in From there, it changed ownership several times, being absorbed by Fox Interactive Media in , then sold to Flixter in , acquired by Warner Bros. The new verified rating is now the site's default Audience Score. Rotten Tomatoes says it is working with cinema chains to verify their ticket stubs too, but for now this arrangement obviously benefits … Fandango.

Still, there's nothing stopping people from bombing a movie for nefarious purposes after it comes out. Prior to August , Tomatometer-approved critics were almost exclusively staff writers from existing publications, who tended to be whiter, maler, and crustier.

Since the site changed its policies, it's added roughly new critics—the majority of whom are freelancers and women. But that also means there are now a stunning 4, critics, some of whom inevitably will be terrible. A couple of years ago, an approved critic named Cole Smithey, who writes for Colesmithey. It's hard to know how much of a difference high or low scores make at the box office. In late , Morning Consult conducted a national poll and found that one-third of Americans look at Rotten Tomatoes before seeing a movie, and 63 percent of those have been deterred by low scores.

Nobody wants a green tomato. Studios hold screenings for critics as close to release dates as possible, to delay splats, while disputing rotten ratings to curators like Giles. In any case, Fandango did not buy Rotten Tomatoes to discourage people from seeing movies. To that point, the site doesn't have its own boss.

Instead, it's led by Fandango's president, a fit, ageless-looking Canadian named Paul Yanover. He started out developing software for animators working on Disney's original Beauty and the Beast, and he doesn't seem like a suit, exactly.

But he knows how the popcorn gets buttered. Fandango makes money in several ways. It also strikes licensing agreements with content providers who want to use the Tomatometer. That, of course, is also the job of Netflix's predictive algorithm. Difference is, Netflix knows your preferences better than the critics do, maybe even better than you know them yourself.

Netflix does not show you a Tomatometer when you browse. It doesn't show you any user ratings at all. Instead, it suggests movies and shows it thinks you'll like, based on movies and shows you've already watched. This, of course, is how Spotify's playlists and Facebook's News Feed work; they're content curators too. In our era of digital excess, we're being recommended to all the time.

Paralyzed by choice, we'll take the suggestions. Given the flaws of the Tomatometer, why use Rotten Tomatoes at all? Here's one reason: While the point of Netflix's algorithm is to keep you on its site as long as possible, the intent of Rotten Tomatoes, ultimately, is to get you off the site.

Sure, it'd like you to go first to Fandango, but then to the movies or maybe a random Gunsmoke rerun. It will lead you—or not, if the reviews are bad—to whatever you looked up in the first place, presumably of your own volition. Which was kind of the point of the internet in the first place. Since Tim Ryan started his archival project, Rotten Tomatoes has created roughly pages for old-time movies on its site, thanks to 5, ancient reviews he unearthed, many by critics who are all but forgotten.

For anyone actually interested in reading movie reviews, there they are. When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works. He thinks Avengers: Endgame has way too high a rating on the Tomatometer. This article appears in the February issue. Subscribe now. Lee was recently in Australia to promote GoldOpen, a social change movement that started in the US, which saw Asian industry leaders buy out whole cinemas to ensure the success of Crazy Rich Asians.

The movie, which is the first Hollywood film in 25 years to have an entirely Asian cast, will be released in Australia on August Lee described Duong as a movie buff. He [Duong] thought, why not put all the good and bad reviews about a movie into one place and have a score for it? Then over the course of the year, we realised that it was the actual business. Lee and his partners sold the website in after the US market crashed in