Fandango wants to control the movie world

The Rotten Tomatoes website can be an important, if somewhat misleading tool to determine which new movies are worth seeing.

From a marketing standpoint, a “fresh” rating on the site is more important now than any of the random blurbs and star ratings you used to see plastered in newspaper ads.

The review aggregate site compiles a couple hundred professional reviews and categorizes them on a simple “fresh” or “rotten” rating.

It’s a simplistic measure, and it won’t necessarily distinguish great films from the ones earning only passable marks.

As of this week, Rotten Tomatoes has a new owner: the online ticketing giant, Fandango.

It’s not a surprising play for Fandango, as integration with Rotten Tomatoes will provide more information on the films available for ticket buyers on the Fandango site. There’s probably some pretty decent ad revenue on the Rotten Tomatoes site too.

The move comes with some concern. Fandango wants butts in the seats, so it’s easy to see an immediate conflict.

Why would Fandango want the webpage selling admission to “Zoolander 2” let buyers see its abysmal 22 percent Rotten Tomatoes score?

It wouldn’t, of course.

We know this because Fandango already fibs on its internal ratings system.

Fandango scores its movies on a five-star scale, based on “fan ratings.”

Interestingly, no film currently showing locally scores below 2-and-a-half stars, and most sit above 3-and-a-half stars.

The well-reviewed Coen-Brothers flop, “Hail, Caesar!” sits at 2-and-a-half stars while holding an 80 percent certified fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Conversely, the universally-panned comedy,”Dirty Grandpa” has a 3-and-a-half star average rating on Fandango while enjoying a 9 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Now sure, there is often disparity between what scores well with critics and general audiences.

To its credit, Rotten Tomatoes also compiles a user score on its film pages, rated by anyone wanting to register an email to the site. “Dirty Grandpa” has a 51 percent user score and “Hail, Caesar!” has a 45 percent, so you could argue those numbers pencil better with Fandango’s “fan ratings.”

Regardless of how you swing it, a 3-and-a-half star rating on “Dirty Grandpa” is extremely generous, and I’d be curious to see just how fuzzy the math is on how Fandango generates the number.

I wouldn’t call it nefarious, but clearly Fandango isn’t sharing the whole truth.

Now, maybe, just maybe, Fandango’s purchase of Rotten Tomatoes is an altruistic move intended to provide all the relevant, purchase-influencing information important to its users.

At best, I can see them listing the Rotten Tomatoes score alongside their same, padded user-submitted star system.

Whether those two numbers deserve equal placement is a different issue, but at least it wouldn’t diminish the influence of the Rotten Tomatoes score.

Ultimately, the influence of Rotten Tomatoes is best measured by the extremes. Scores in the 90th percentile can be successfully marketed as a selling point for a given film, whereas only the lowest ratings see any measurable box office influence (“Fantastic Four,” anyone?).

Since most movies don’t fall into those scores, Fandango probably shouldn’t worry about Rotten Tomatoes scores influencing its ticket sales.

Still, as someone who has been a frequent user of Rotten Tomatoes for years, I worry about Fandango meddling with what made the site so influential in the first place.

I don’t always like boiling movies down to a simple “fresh” or “rotten” score, but Rotten Tomatoes has long been a substantive source to a variety of film opinions, so long as you click beyond the single-sentence review blurbs.

Whatever happens to Rotten Tomatoes, at least we still have Metacritic, an aggregate site providing a much more complex scoring system, based on the opinions of long-established and respected critics around the country.

Scores of 1-100 are assigned to the reviews, which creates a more reasoned consensus score.

Don’t worry — the site still includes user scores for anyone wanting a multi-paragraph rant on Kylo Ren’s lineage in “Star Wars.”

It will be interesting to see what the future holds for Fandango. Hopefully it won’t ruin Rotten Tomatoes.

But maybe it will make Fandango better, and maybe even eliminate the notion of “Alvin & the Chipmunks: The Road Chip” being a four-star movie.

Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com