How do we explain the disconnect in rotten tomatoes scores for RoP?

Annatar said:

That little fluff there under the branch.... is that a little beard you're growing now?

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One wonders, my precious, one wonders.

I know little about Rotten Tomatoes, but I find in general that critics and I see things very differently. I wonder if they are looking for art and I am looking for entertainment.

As to the Rings of Power series, I often see posters aghast that such-and-such detail is wrong but that often doesn't bother me. I guess I see the written word and the TV series as similar but they don't need to be exactly the same. For example, RoP compressed the timeline so that they didn't need to have a new cast of humans each week. Their goal was to tell the essence of the story, not an exact retelling. I'm fine with it but some of my friends ranted every week about what they got "wrong." :-(

arivista said:

I don't know whether the proffesional ciritcs actually like the shows they are endorsing or not, but in any case, they can't (or think they can't) afford to ciritize anything with Strong Female Lead Characters or Diversity Cast (SFLC/DC).

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It's not just that Twitter will attack them, the studios can also pull early reviewing if the keep getting reviews they don't like or are detrimental to their income. They'll find critics more favourable instead and you'll be left only giving reviews AFTER the show or movie premiers. That's a death knell to a critic, especially professional ones.

finarvyn said:

I guess I see the written word and the TV series as similar but they don't need to be exactly the same.

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They don't need to be, but a vague proximity would be nice.

finarvyn said:

For example, RoP compressed the timeline so that they didn't need to have a new cast of humans each week.

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They wouldn't need to. You focus on the forging of the Rings of Power and the War of the Elves and Sauron first, then you only need to worry about the Elves, a handful of dwarves, and Minastir (at the end of the War). Then you jump ahead to the end of the 2nd Age and you trot out the human cast they largely have now: Míriel, Pharazôn, Amandil, Elendil, Isildur, Anarion.

finarvyn said:

Their goal was to tell the essence of the story, not an exact retelling.

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How do you feel they have caught the essence of the story, though? There's no Annatar teaching the elves. No Celebrimbor and Sauron. Both major parts of the forging of the Rings.

Not a few professional reviewers are shills.
I think the majority of "Pro reviewers" on Rotten Tomatoes are shilling to some extent, which would account for the great disparity of ratings between the pros and the proles for RoP; but also for many other movies that have a similar disparity of ratings.
(The Pros know what side their bread is buttered on)

Deimos said:

Not a few professional reviewers are shills.
I think the majority of "Pro reviewers" on Rotten Tomatoes are shilling to some extent, which would account for the great disparity of ratings between the pros and the proles for RoP; but also for many other movies that have a similar disparity of ratings.
(The Pros know what side their bread is buttered on)

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I don't doubt that. But there are other shills active on the Internet, serving a clientele that craves, to very likely simplify, "likes". There are endless "ratings" sites, for example, for tourist destinations. There are zillions of homepages of people, the subculture of "influencers" at the forefront (overlap with "ratings" here), but also those of people professionally interested in media attention.
These specific shills have skills to flood the Internet with fake user accounts. Besides the above, or even more so, who would be interested in bloating their relative insignificance? Tiny rabid minorities. Now I don't have the foggiest notion what sort of finances are needed to create a flood of fake accounts. But there's another tiny minority, the filthy rich. Who mainly got that way by being master manipulators. They would, if necessary, probably gladly provide finance - most likely a pittance for them - such floods of fakery for other minorities, of the rabid sort, that they had duped into becoming useful tools for themselves. This manipulative flooding effect might have led to the much lower "wider audience" rating compared to Rotten Tomatoes.

It doesn't exclude the possibility that the show simply stank. Amazon's reaction to criticism (the few examples that I noticed here in TTF threads) has to be title contender for utter, unmitigated PR stupidity that I have ever come across in my life. Possibly fired by the near-infinite megalomania of the CEO.

Well, if you keep giving negative scores the studios aren't really incentivized to give you previews and they'll stop handing them out to you. So to some degree reviewers are "encouraged" to give at least decent reviews or their ability to do their job will dry up.

ZehnWaters said:

Well, if you keep giving negative scores the studios aren't really incentivized to give you previews and they'll stop handing them out to you. So to some degree reviewers are "encouraged" to give at least decent reviews or their ability to do their job will dry up.

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Put another way, one has to be "less than honest" in order to be paid.
An honorable/honest person would find work that doesn't require him to lie.

Deimos said:

Put another way, one has to be "less than honest" in order to be paid.
An honorable/honest person would find work that doesn't require him to lie.

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Or make their job work regardless. Accept that your review will have to come out after the film has a general public release.

ZehnWaters said:

Or make their job work regardless. Accept that your review will have to come out after the film has a general public release.

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Yep...but a lot of reviews I have read were "after the release" and it was s till a good review.
I don't mean the reviewer gushed over the film, just that it was a thoughtful review,.

Deimos said:

Yep...but a lot of reviews I have read were "after the release" and it was s till a good review.
I don't mean the reviewer gushed over the film, just that it was a thoughtful review,.

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Yeah but news and news-adjacent jobs have become a game of who can get out first.