New app Quarator seeks to reduce instances of review bombing through an ingenious new test to keep the trolls at bay and shake up the status quo set by review aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes. Qurator comes from filmmaker Thomas Eromose Ikimi (Legacy: Black Ops) and actor Brandon Victor Dixon (Hamilton, NBC's Jesus Christ Superstar).
These days, it seems like every time a movie comes out with a lead actor who isn't a straight white male, its Rotten Tomatoes audience review score is bombarded with trolls who bring down the Audience Score with reactionary hate speech and whining complaints about "SJW" agendas. Whether it's Black Panther, Captain Marvel, or the Daisy Ridley-led Star Wars films, the Audience Score on many big blockbusters is an unreliable metric for judging the quality of a film. That's where Qurator comes in.
The new app doesn't just let users post reviews and tip the scales of a particular movie on a whim. In an ingenious tactic, users must play a trivia game in order to rate a film. It's a 60-second quiz, and questions are pulled at random from a pool of potentially dozens or more, depending on the movie. Score a 51 or higher on the 100 point quiz, and you get to rate the film. However, there are four tiers of victory, with the higher tiers given more weight when averaging the scores together. If users fail the quiz, they get one more chance, but must score 75 or more in order to review. If they fail a second time, the movie gets locked until the user earns a qualifying score on five other films.
There is no distinction between critic and audience scores in Qurator. It's all thrown together, with the people who prove their knowledge having more influence over a movie's score than people who don't score as highly on the test. Furthermore, users can only comment on reviews of films for which they've earned a qualifying score. All of this adds together to create an environment where trolls are met with resistance on every step. The way Ikimi sees it, Qurator is the only way to combat trolls:
"To leave a review (on other sites), you just clicked a button. There was no barrier to trolling. There was no barrier to sandbagging. And then, on the other side, you had critic scores where, to be honest, if you're a critic, there's so much incentive for particular films to be reviewed well versus other films. And you will see that played out when you look at the Fresh vs Rotten, and when you look at the discrepancy with Audience Scores. A lot of us fans just couldn't trust anything anymore. Then, online, you find people who are toxic on one side or the other."
Simply put, Qurator is the solution to all the biggest problems with Rotten Tomatoes. One of the best features of Qurator is the so-called Movie Club, where users can seek out individuals and follow them for movie recommendations. This is where the actual curation comes into play. Movies are so much more than a binary scale of "good or bad." There's much to enjoy in the realm of cinema beyond blockbusters and award season contenders. For his part, Ikimi cites American Ninja 2, Bright, Commando, and The Cable Guy as films he loves that may not conform to the binary scale of "good or bad" through which too many people currently rate movies. Through the Movie Club, Qurator allows users to discover new movies through their friends and people they choose to follow. The current selection of films on the app is relatively small, and some essentials are currently missing (where's Billy Jack?), but more movies are added all the time. New releases are obviously more popular and take priority, but older films are being added to the service at a steady clip.
If it takes off the way its leaders hope it does, Qurator could be a true game-changer in the realm of user reviews that has largely been dominated by Rotten Tomatoes. Its anti-troll tactics are effective, at least in the short term, and it is shaping up to be a healthy and positive environment for film discussion without having to deal with quite as many random haters as places like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, or the rest of the internet.