Rottentomatoes.com top 20 Movies: What people watch before they watch
Written by Max Freiert (contact - e-mail) -- October 3rd, 2007 | Recommend ThisI don’t think I’m alone in thinking that a) going out to the movies has gotten ridiculously expensive and b) most mainstream movies aren’t terrific. Given these two truths, RottenTomatoes.com is a default stop most Fridays; one critic’s review may not be a good measure of my future satisfaction with a movie, but when multiple reviews are averaged they become a powerful tool.
Rotten tomatoes has been steadily growing for the past 5 years. The chart below shows unique visitors per month, from August 2002 to August 2007. Over that time period the site has grown from just over 1 million visitors to nearly 2.5, peaking in December at over 3 million. Interestingly, while unique visitors has fallen since the December peak, Visitors spend about 25% more time on the site, so monthly attention remains relatively consistent.
The home page of Rottentomatoes.com answers the most immediate question visitors have;“Is the movie I’m about to see not a dive?”. But at around $10 a seat, there are reasons to dig deeper, so what movies were RottenTomatoes.com visitors researching the most? The chart below shows the top 20 movies on RottenTomatoes ranked by the amount of total time spent on each movie, from January 2007 to August 2007, along with each movie’s total budget, opening weekend revenue, and “TomatoMeter” score.
- Its (sort of) all about the ad spend: It appears that the primary influence on consumer interest all comes back to money. Generally, movies with the largest budgets received the most traffic.
- …then our ticket lines will wait in the shade: An internet rock star, 300 was the only site with a sub-$100 million budget to make it into the top five. It’s enormous online presence also helped drived $72 million in opening weekend sales.
- Lipstick on a pig: Bad movies with big budgets (Eragon, Fantastic 4, Ghostrider) tend to attract far less interest on the site than their more positively reviewed peers, but it doesn’t seem to impact opening weekend sales.
- A different kind of action movie: Amazingly, even RottenTomatoes isn’t immune to the adult industry’s massive web presence. WWE Divas Undressed captured more attention on the site than Live Free or Die Hard.
…but I’d still bet on Mclane any day.
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Posted under: Attention, Compete Ranked Lists, Consumer Electronics - Gaming, Social Web |
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Get the 
October 4th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
To me, it seems you need to compare it to the marketing budget.
I am sure the movies budget follows very closely the total budget.
People want to know more about the most marketed movies.
Pans Labyrinth’s had no budget at all, but it was a top movie. Why is that? Same with Borat? How do you explain that?
October 4th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Scott - Great point! Marketing budget would have been a better comparison, but unfortunately that information isn’t readily available, especially across all of the film studios responsible for these top 20.
To answer your pans labyrinth question, it might be that a very small marketing budget actually enticed people to research the movie more. Pan’s Labyrinth received rave reviews, had an obscure name, and did very little in the way of marketing, so its only natural that curious people would check out a site like RottenTomatoes to learn more.
Borat was a “great success” on the internet before, during and after the movie’s release. Additionally, it’s unlikely that the movie had a large production budget, so its possible that a substantial part of the overall budget was devoted to marketing.
October 5th, 2007 at 3:59 am
Success is promoted by Money but sometimes Money can’t bring success !
We as e-marketers follow the success (high ranked websites…) to bring money :-)
October 9th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
The “TomatoMeter” is usually right.
For instance, Eragon was a “been there, seen that” movie from start to finish and the reviewers reflected that in the movie’s less than enviable score.
If democracy worked like this movie site, we wouldn’t be sitting pretty (waiting to vote -and- voice out our opinion) for four, long “political” years ; )
January 28th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
thanks..