Paramount Pictures didn’t let most movie critics take a peek at their latest hit, “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.”
Only a select group was allowed to see the film, very loosely based on the beloved action toys of yore, before it opened last week.
Which critics? Fanboys, essentially. Critics deemed “soft” and eager to lap up the CGI parade “Joe” was peddling.
The initial wave of reviews were mostly glowing – no surprise – with many Fanboys claiming the film tickled their inner 10-year-old.
So why bother even reading these reviews?
If you hate “stuffy” critics and don’t mind movies without plot, character development and the like (yes, I’m talking about the “Transformers” sequel) then don’t read reviews.
But what possible good can a Fanboy review offer at this point? Frankly, their comments serve little purpose.
I love horror movies. Period. But I’m not going to rubber stamp a horror movie because it ladles out the gore or other genre essentials. That would be insulting the genre and those who relish a great horror flick.
Isn’t that what Fanboys are doing with their reviews?
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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
This trend really struck during the “Phantom Menace” back in 1999. George Lucas was untouchable. When the bad reviews came, the fanboys went nuts. Studios with popular franchises know they can feed their films to the fanboy base and they’ll do much of their bidding, whether attacking critics or propping up these films as modern masterpieces.
I always get a chuckle at this site and Kyle Smith’s when an outlier comment for a movie post a few months back (say Star Trek for example) gets a comment brought in from Rotten Tomatoes or elsewhere. It’s a certainty what will be said. It’s like “The Most Dangerous Game” with geeks and Firefox.
The Phantom Menace is EXACTLY the point … no true Fanboy could critique the film – “it’s Lucas’ vision …” they’d say in unison. Scary.
Eh, it sounds like a sound business strategy to me. If you are a studio and you realize that you have a $100M bomb to drop on the theaters, you have to try to gin up as much first day attendance as possible. The best way to do that is let a few fanboys in early and hope that their word-of-mouth will bring in more people like them and hopefully a few others. At this point, I imagine the studio bigwigs are not looking to make a profit, but looking to recover some of their losses and make up the rest on DVD.
I get the strategy from the studio’s POV. But I don’t see how reading a Fanboy review helps the audience. They’re pre-disposed to like a film that falls in their genre wheelhouse …
It doesn’t help the audience at all. The real question is why anyone takes a fanboy review seriously, but thousands flock to Ain’t It Cool where you can find 10,000 word treatise about the Oscar-worthiness of Hell-Boy 2 in prose that would make eyes bleed on a good day.
It doesn’t help except to get those who already bought the midnight ticket to also buy tickets for a second screening and possibly drag along a reluctant friend or two because, “so and so said it was super cool!” If anyone who was not already predisposed to like this kind of thing takes the fanboy reviews seriously then they deserve the $30 hollywood/theater concession tax.
I’m a fanboy and I thought I couldn’t have seen a worse movie this year than “Transformers 2″…..that changed last Friday at around 4:15PM EST.
I remember being part of the “Lucas’s Vision” crowd up until 2 years ago when I watched all the prequels in a row and realized what a great story but horrid execution can produce in a film.
I loved READING the prequel stories (except for the Midichlorian garbage)…but the execution on film when the action died down was HORRIBLE. No wonder Ewan McGreggor has distanced himself from the series.
PaulM, thanks for your candor. I think we all wanted “The Phantom Menace” to rock when we first saw it. It will age badly. Very badly.
My take: it’s the studios experimenting about how to game Rotten Tomatoes. Think about it: if that site aggregates lots of reviewers, coming up with a combined score, but the only reviews that are out are from people picked because they’ll skew high, then the studios can begin to gain control over RT.
Next up, my movie script on the subject…
Question, who decides if a critic’s review at RT is rotten or fresh? Is it the critic themselves or some one pulling the lever?
RT describes their method here. I don’t think their system actually works very well. It’s not at all unusual to see mainly negative reviews labeled “fresh”, and vise-versa. I find Metacritic much more consistent.
I contribute to RT and it’s up to me to decide whether a particular movie is fresh or rotten. It’s not so simple … some movies are smart and ambitious but ultimately fail. So how do you grade that on an up-or-down scale?
According to RT themselves, it’s not always that simple:
Interesting … it’s lame that critics can’t be bothered to rate their own work. The whole process of adding a review to RT takes about a minute or less.
Are you a member of Online Film Critics Society? The part of the above paragraph that I didn’t quote (because it was mainly repeating what you had just written) said:
Which implies that non-members don’t.