We all know the cinematic experience is becoming too expensive for the general moviegoing public, not to mention that streaming sites such as Netflix are all but stealing cineplex money away. This leads to people becoming pickier and relying more on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic to make their decisions on a Saturday night flick. All of this has had studios panicking, instead of, you know, trying to make quality movies instead. A few Hollywood studios are even thinking of withholding critics from seeing their films, the lack of organized press screenings has risen over the past year or so.
Judging by my own experiences, millennials are really into Rotten Tomatoes. Most of the ones I speak to value a movie's RT score and make their decisions to buy a movie ticket exclusively based on that.
Now, with "Justice League" being released this Friday, the review embargo will be lifted on Wednesday morning — more specifically, the studio-imposed embargo lifts at 2:50 am Eastern on November 15. However, you won't know if the movie is “fresh” or “rotten” because Rotten Tomatoes will wait a full day after the embargo lifts to reveal its rating.
This is all in relation to RT's new weekly show called Rotten Tomatoes See It / Skip It, broadcast on Facebook via the social media site’s Watch platform. One of the show’s main features will be a “Tomatometer Score Reveal” — for which "Justice League" is featured this week. The episode containing the reveal is scheduled to air at 12:01 am on Thursday, November 16.
What do I think about all this? I think Rotten Tomatoes is trying to help the WB/DC by delaying it a day late, even though reviews will be available to read a day prior, it won't matter. The majority of the mainstream these days don't really read reviews, they look at an aggregated score instead. We all know "Justice League" will most likely have a rotten score.