Disney Bans LA Times Writers From Advance Screenings In Response To Negative Articles

from the charm-offensive dept

Once again, Disney has decided to sacrifice goodwill for brand perception. Not content to limit itself to sending C&Ds to kids' birthday party performers, Disney's latest act of self-savagery has resulted in backlash from several top journalistic entities.

Back in September, the LA Times dug into Disney's supremely cosy relationship with Anaheim's government -- one that has produced years of subsidies, incentives, and tax shelters for the entertainment giant. Disney wasn't happy with the report, so it responded the way any rational company would: it issued a statement stating the articles were full of errors and claimed the LA Times "showed a complete disregard for basic journalistic standards." (Despite these claims, Disney has yet to ask for corrections to the LA Times' investigative articles.)

Then it responded the way any irrational company would: by locking LA Times reviewers out of advance movie screenings.

The Los Angeles Times had made Disney’s blackout public in a note to readers last week that explained why no feature articles about Disney movies appeared in its 2017 holiday movie preview section. Disney also did not give The Times early access to “Thor: Ragnarok” so that it could prepare a review in time for its Friday opening.

This resulted in the sort of thing Disney should have expected. Critics groups and several large newspapers showed their support for the LA Times by refusing to attend Disney movie screenings. The critics groups also announced they would not consider any Disney films for awards until the ban was lifted. But what likely hurt Disney the most was the show of support from powerful Hollywood figures, one of which -- Ava DuVernay -- has a movie slated to be released by Disney next March.

Thanks to the swift, strong backlash, Disney has now rescinded its ban. But you won't be hearing Disney admit to being wrong. Instead, it's still trying to portray the LA Times as the sole transgressor in this debacle.

“We’ve had productive discussions with the newly installed leadership at The Los Angeles Times regarding our specific concerns, and as a result, we’ve agreed to restore access to advance screenings for their film critics,” Disney said in a statement.

Yep. Nothing to do with the backlash prompted by its bullshit move. Instead, it's all about a recent regime change and some "productive discussions." And the entertainment giant has nothing to say about its stupidly punitive actions resulting in more attention being drawn to the LA Times articles it disagrees with. There's not much that's more counterproductive than attempting to punish news outlets for delivering news. Even if the news outlet is in the wrong, there's nothing to be gained from refusing to be the adult in the room.

Filed Under: anaheim, censorship, corporate bad behavior, corruption, movie reviews, reviews
Companies: disney, la times

Fandango Games Movie Reviews So It's Technically Impossible For A Film To Suck

from the Battlefield-Earth-was-a-modern-masterpiece dept

Review manipulation in the crowdsourced data era is of course nothing new. Amazon just filed a new lawsuit against more than 1,000 people who were selling reviews for as little as $5 a pop. Elsewhere, companies with a vested interest in making their streaming video catalog as attractive as possible will magically skew aggregated review data higher. Head over to any number of services like Walmart's Vudu and you'll notice that it's almost impossible for a crap film to drop below three stars, not matter how foul of an unholy abomination it is.

Comcast-owned Fandango appears to be no exception. As a company that sells movie tickets, Fandango obviously has a vested interest in not portraying the products it sells as absolute crap. Indeed, an analysis of Fandango data conducted by Five-Thirty-Eight (prompted by somebody noticing the new Fantastic Four movie was rated far higher than such a dumpster fire deserved) found that the company's website ensured it was impossible for most movies to ever see less than a three-star rating:

"When I pulled the data for 510 films on Fandango.com that had tickets on sale this year, something looked off right away: Of the 437 films with at least one review, 98 percent had a 3-star rating or higher and 75 percent had a 4-star rating or higher. It seemed nearly impossible for a movie to fail by Fandango’s standards. When I focused on movies that had 308 or more user reviews, none of the 209 films had below a 3-star rating. Seventy-eight percent had a rating of 4 stars or higher."

They dumped all the data to GitHub for perusal, and offered up a handy graphic highlighting the disparity between Fandango and other movie reviewing websites:Looking further at the html source showed that the Fandango website took reviews that were recorded on server as half-a-star lower and boosted the rating on the customer-facing end. When pressed, Fandango blamed the skewed rankings on a bug that happens to have gone overlooked for years:

"However, after further back and forth, the company described the rounding disparity — by which, for example, 4.1 is rounded to 4.5 — as a bug in the system rather than a general practice. “There appears to be a software glitch on our site with the rounding logic of our five star rating system, as it rounds up to the next highest half star instead of the nearest half star,” the company said in an emailed statement. Fandango told us that it plans to fix the rounding algorithm on its website “as soon as possible."

That hasn't happened yet, though surely a company owned by Comcast will get around to it soon? Of course, tastes are subjective, so there's never going to be a perfect review system; I often find 95% or higher movies on Rotten Tomatoes that I think are abysmal, lowest-common-denominator aardvark vomit. Still, if you actually want to have users return to your website, it seems like it might be a good idea to have something vaguely resembling trust and integrity at the heart of your review analysis and aggregation system. Granted, if Fandango inherits any of its parent company DNA, caring much about that sort of thing likely isn't high up on the action item list.

Filed Under: data, misleading data, movie reviews
Companies: comcast, fandango