You literally have no way of proving that the opt-in votes that account for RT's 50% negative audience score *actually represent* 50% of those who saw it. However while the box office numbers don't for a second prove that it's a good film it does show that it's a popular film. Combine that with 3rd party audience polls and critic scores and it's easy to see which stat is the anomaly. But hey, you agree with the anomaly so everything else is rigged/bought off/wrong right?
I paid to see this movie opening weekend and well ... I liked it about as much as Anakin likes sand.
I didn't leave a review on Rotten Tomatoes (positive or negative) and I wasn't asked to take part in cinemascores poll or any other polls for that matter.
So am I to be counted amongst those that 'liked' the movie because I paid to see it thereby contributing to the box office (I want my money back lol but that wasn't an option unfortunately)?
If you get a chance to read through a few pages of the latest Rotten Tomatoes audience reviews you may notice a trend that a lot of the negative ones are long, detailed and discuss reasons other than the 'rarrr I hate diversity / feminism' angle. Compare that with the positive reviews which I have found to be typically 3 lines long and say 'Yay it's Star Wars but new and if you don't like that then boohoo fanboy because Star Wars isn't for you anymore ... but man that Canto Bight scene dragged' (sure there are outliers on each side).
I've been watching Rotten Tomatoes on a daily basis ever since I saw the film ... for the lols I tell you (and because I'm sad, mostly because I'm sad ... like 51% because I'm sad and 49% for the lols) and I agree with you that the 49% 'like it' score is pretty meaningless. RT are without a doubt applying some form of aggregator / algorithm to 'count' audience scores. I've noticed a much much higher proportion of negative reviews against positive ones during my time reading them and ever since it hit 50% the score has barely budged despite the larger proportion of negative reviews that keep on rolling in (perhaps it's some form of 'anti-troll algorithm' or something). It also lacks transparency because you can't go back further than the last 50 pages of audience review scores so it is impossible to actually count each one and check RT's averages. Without knowing the algorithm that RT applies to the scores it's not possible to truly apply any weight to the 'audience score' that they provide.
I guess my point is that all these things / scores / critic's reviews can be manipulated and all the websites putting them out / publishing them have an agenda of some sorts (whether it's to get more traffic to their page or perhaps even to please the Galactic Empir... er Disney).
I know a lot of folks point to the box office score and yeh I agree it's large but when you put it in context (i.e. that it's a Star Wars saga movie, the follow up to the box office smash hit TFA, had a monumental marketing campaign / hype machine behind it and was set to resolve a lot of dangling plot threads from TFA) is it really as high as you were expecting and do you think it's what the shareholders / directors were anticipating?
In the end I can only go on my view and I strongly disliked the movie (it now stands alongside X-men Last Stand, Alien 3 and Dark Tower in my most disappointing movies of all time list). I don't think I'm a troll (I'm too lazy for that haha), I'm fairly liberal in my views and most importantly I'm a super easy SW fan to please... I like the freakin prequels. I'm not an old OT purist as I'm from the prequel generation so I would have thought that I'm one of the fans that Disney were hoping to hang on to ... you know when they let the past die and killed it when they had to.
I can't believe that I actually have more interest in Solo now than Episode 9 ... if you could have told me that prior to watching TLJ I would have laughed so hard but alas the joke was on me. What sucks the most is that I really wanted to like this movie, I don't enjoy being a 'hater' and I like even less seeing a picture that leaves me feeling so disappointed.
