REDEEMING LOVE opening | Rotten Tomatoes scores continue to rise | January 28 to 30, 2022 weekend
Opening weekend box office numbers, charts and commentary
The current weekend: January 28 to 30, 2022
1) Redeeming Love opening
- This is a weak opening. Young adult romance is a small but vibrant genre, and faith-based movies have carved out a respectable niche, but the two rarely mix. I Still Believe was the closest thing to it. That film opened solidly to $9.1m at the start of the pandemic, but somehow finished with only $9.9m, for a 1.1 domestic multiple.
- Most of these movies stick with inspirational drama. Someone gets sick, or has a moral dilemma, and needs a miracle. The romance is PG-13. Unplanned was rated R because she got pregnant, twice. Redeeming Love is a period western, to boot. Anyway, reviews are poor and these movies do not travel well abroad:
2) Rotten Tomatoes scores
- Rotten Tomatoes' average review scores for wide releases have increased from 44.7 before 2011, to 63.9 in 2021. Are movies improving? No, they're the same. Rotten Tomatoes has said that the increase comes from adding more critics, with more diverse backgrounds, but that doesn't add up -- one set of professional critics would not be more positive than another set.
- The improvement in the scores coincides with Warner Bros.' acquisition of Rotten Tomatoes in 2010, and then Universal's acquisition of a 75% majority stake in 2017. Whatever the explanation for the changing scores, they're better than they were. After all, what's the point of a review website that trashes movies with a negative bias?
- Rotten Tomatoes rewards a score of 60 and up with a shiny red tomato, and 59 and below gets an ugly green splat. A picture is worth a 1,000 words and those shiny tomatoes and green splats are everywhere. If 60 is the dividing line, then the average should be as close to 60 as possible, and it's closer now.
- At the same time, let's not get carried away. The 63.9 score in 2021 is getting bubbly. There would be less of a problem if there were a middle ground of 40 to 59, for mixed reviews. Right now, reviews with a 60 score are good, and reviews with a 59 score are bad. That's not right:
- All those pre-2011 movies that still carry an ugly green splat wherever they appear on viewing apps and websites -- those biased scores should be adjusted. In 2004, 73.4% of wide releases got the green splat; in 2019 it was 46.4%, and in 2021 it was 39.6%. Many of those early scores were distorted, and they are misleading to this day.