Warner Brothers buys Flixter and Rotten Tomatoes (1 Viewer)

[mattCR]

http://www.deadline.com/2011/05/flixster-and-rotten-tomatoes-bought-by-warner-bros-home-entertainment-will-operate-independently/

BURBANK, Calif., May 4, 2011 – Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group today announced an agreement to acquire Flixster, the movie discovery application company with over 25 million worldwide users per month. The acquisition also includes Rotten Tomatoes website devoted to film reviews, information and news. Under the terms of the deal, Flixster will continue to operate independently and will expand its services beyond movie discovery to enable digital content ownership and delivery across any connected digital device.

Warner is going to start changing these sites to allow for sell-through of digital media, as well as promotion of their services.

 

[Patrick Sun]

That seems weird in terms of a studio buying a movie review site, conflict of interest, perhaps.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

^ The only thing that insulates Rotten Tomatoes from conflict of interest is that its an aggregator of reviews, not primarily a producer of reviews. As long as they don't start omitting reviewers who review Warner Bros. movies poorly, it shouldn't be a problem.

 

[Sam Posten]

I think this is one of the dumbest things ever, UNLESS they can do it as transparently as Amazon does www.dpreview.com


If they can make it work like Amazon does, great. Otherwise RT is dead to most readers.

 

[Martino]

Have to keep track and make sure that the % of favorable reviews for Warner Brothers films do not go up...but they could also use this to sabatoge thier competors with a larger % of non-favorable reviews for non-Warner films. I don't think they would buy this without having some sort of benifit...

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Warner can buy Rotten Tomatoes and every other critics website on the internet, and Speed Racer and The Matrix 3 are still gonna have terrible reviews no matter what

 

[WadeLil]

They just wanted FLIXSTER....ROTTENTOM just happened to come with it.

 

[stevedavis]

why they bought it !!!!!!!its a movie reviewing site!!!!!!!