Rotten Tomatoes: New Report Claims PR Firm Paid for Positive Reviews

A new report digging into the metrics and effects of movie/TV aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes makes a pretty eye-raising claim: review scores can be bought and paid for (in a manner of speaking) – and one PR firm allegedly paid to skew the reviews in favor of their film. 

The PR company in question is Bunker 15, whose official website lists the company as a “smart-tech Publicity Engine” that “helps find the right journalists to promote your film (VOD or Theatrical)… Bunker 15 utilizes high-leverage methods of promotion on Social Media and through online communities. Our online platform puts films in front of the audiences that care the most about your subjects.”

In the report by Vulture, there’s an entire breakdown of the system that PR firms can use to skew aggregate review scores on sites like Rotten Tomatoes. One of the little-known routes to doing that is apparently PR firms recruiting lesser-known or lower-tier film critics, who can be pressed to give more favorable reviews than normal – or even divert any negative takes away from platforms like Rotten Tomatoes and onto personal blogs, and such. 

Here are some revealing excerpts from the report, regarding PR influence on Rotten Tomatoes scores: 

But just because the “Tomatometer” says a title is “rotten” – scoring below 60 percent – it doesn’t need to stay that way. Bunker 15 went to work. While most film-PR companies aim to get the attention of critics from top publications, Bunker 15 takes a more bottom-up approach, recruiting obscure, often self-published critics who are nevertheless part of the pool tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. In another break from standard practice, several critics say, Bunker 15 pays them $50 or more for each review. (These payments are not typically disclosed, and Rotten Tomatoes says it prohibits “reviewing based on a financial incentive.”)

There has been increasing scrutiny on Rotten Tomatoes and other aggregate sites, regarding how they actually tally these scores, and whether the process is as clean and unbiased as it’s made to seem. The case of Star Wars starlet Daisy Ridley’s 2018 Hamlet re-imagining Ophelia seems to be a lightning rod example of how PR manipulation of the system creates a manufactured review score: 

Between October 2018 and January 2019, Rotten Tomatoes added eight reviews to Ophelia’s score. Seven were favorable, and most came from critics who have reviewed at least one other Bunker 15 movie. The writer of a negative review says that Bunker 15 lobbied them to change it; if the critic wanted to “give it a (barely) overall positive then I do know the editors at Rotten Tomatoes and can get it switched,” a Bunker 15 employee wrote. I also discovered another negative review of Ophelia from this period that was not counted by Rotten Tomatoes, by a writer whose positive reviews of other Bunker 15 films have been recorded by the aggregator. Ophelia climbed the Tomatometer to 62 percent, flipping from rotten to “fresh.” 

To many cynical film fans, this will hardly rank as news. However, it will be interesting to see if Rotten Tomatoes ‘ continues its more open policy of approving critics, or if things change as a result of this exposé.