Fandango, which is coming off a banner year in 2015, announced on Feb. 17 that it is acquiring the movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes and streaming movie site Flixster from Warner Bros. Entertainment. The move will help Fandango become an even bigger player in the movie industry.
Warner Bros. Entertainment will have a minority stake in the bigger Fandango, reports Deadline. Fandango itself is under NBCUniversal.
Fandango President Paul Yanover said in a statement:
“Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes are invaluable resources for movie fans, and we look forward to growing these successful properties, driving more theatrical ticketing and super-serving consumers with all their movie needs. Our new expanded network will offer unparalleled capabilities for all of our exhibition, studio and promotional partners to reach a massive entertainment audience with innovative marketing and ticketing solutions that benefit from original content, home entertainment products, ‘super tickets,’ gifts with purchase and other new promotional opportunities.”
Rotten Tomatoes is already a big player in Hollywood because marketing firms for movies often push good scores on the “Tomatometer.” Bad “Tomatometer” ratings can hurt a film even before it hits theaters. It’s not clear how this will change though. Fandango wants users to buy movie tickets, so why would the company want to publicize bad reviews?
In October, FiveThirtyEight published a study on Fandango ratings compared to ratings on other sites and found that even critically panned movies get good ratings on Fandango. Films like Mortdecai or Fantastic Four, which both got terrible reviews from critics, earned 3.5- and 3-star ratings on Fandango, respectively. A more recent example is the Kevin Hart/Ice Cube comedy Ride Along 2. It has a four-star rating on Fandango, but only has a 14 percent fresh rating on RT.
UPDATE: Fandango told FiveThirtyEight that the higher ratings were caused by an algorithm system that would be fixed and is not used for their mobile app. The mobile app also displayed ratings from MetaCritic, another review aggregating site.
Fandango also acquired Flixster, a movie streaming platform. The company also acquired M-GO, another digital distributor of movies, in January.