Week 1 Update

Most people enjoy watching movies, and most people spend a lot of their time reading stuff on the internet. Consequently, most people’s opinions of media are skewed by opinions they’ve read online. Most commonly people use sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic to check reviews and then make their moviegoing decisions. These numbers are so influential to people’s opinions that movie trailers have even started to use the Rotten Tomatoes score to justify people going to watch it.

It’s not hard to see why people use these websites to help them choose what to watch. The big number immediately creates the perception of good or bad. However, not a lot of people really know how these sites work. Most of these movie review sites are in fact aggregate sites, which collect reviews and present them in a simplified fashion. Rotten Tomatoes collects reviews on a scale of Positive/Negative, and presents it as a percentage. Metacritic collects the reviews in terms of an out of 10 (out of 100) scale, and presents that number as an average as well. Due to these aggregates, it doesn’t 100% accurately represent the critics’ views, but it is enough to influence opinions on a large scale.

What I plan to investigate is the extent of the influence of review aggregate websites on the opinions of moviegoers, and the effect the reviews have on the monetary earnings of each movie. To prep, I found a paper (from 2015) researching a similar premise as mine. In this paper, they described that people with a supposed “high Self-Monitoring” to be less affected by reviews; people who were more independent and self conscious were able to come up with their own opinions and were less likely to be influenced by something they read. This is an interesting point that I hadn’t considered and I will be working this into my future questions.

Movies you should see this week:
1: Lego Movie 2
2: Alita: Battle Angel
3: Glass (if you really want to)