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- Paul Yanover, president of the Fandango online ticketing website, spoke to Business Insider about how the company is evolving its Rotten Tomatoes aggregator site to keep pace with its times.
- Yanover also explained what happened last week for customers buying "Avengers: Endgame" tickets and his plan to make his company a destination beyond the sale of movie tickets.
Despite all the talk about the ongoing destruction of the cinema experience, last week reminded us that an exhibition is certainly not dead. Just ask the people of Fandango.
The leader of online ticketing treated April 2 as its Super Bowl, because in a way it was.
Before most people were woken up that day, Fandango had two wards of the war, one at its headquarters in Beverly Hills, and the other in a suite at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. , where company president Paul Yanover and many other company executives attended CinemaCon, the annual convention of theater owners.
Everyone was checking the system twice and thrice, and conversing on Slack to make sure that as soon as 5am would arrive, it would not happen again when "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" would have exploded on the site. At 5 am, tickets in advance for "Avengers: Endgame" would go on sale, and Yanover and his team knew it would be huge.
"You can tell from the first 15 minutes of online sales that the price will be higher than" The Force Awakens, "Yanover told Business Insider the next day. "Because we can not increase our size to meet a three-hour window every two years, we have created a system to manage the situation in an orderly way.People had to wait, we can not do anything about it, but nothing crushed. "
You may be one of those people who bought tickets to Fandango last week and were taken to a waiting room. This was on purpose. Yanover is the first to admit that when it comes to buying something on the Web, there should be no "waiting". As Endgame tickets are a different animal, the company has essentially built a retention room to serve all of its customers, something it never had to do before. But when the dust dissipated, many chains licking their wounds and their ticketing services unable to withstand an avalanche of activity, Fandango had its best day selling tickets in its history.
He sold millions of tickets in a day (Fandango would not give an exact figure to Business Insider), beating the previous record held by "The Force Awakens".
This day "went very well because we thought of it as a technology company," Yanover said. And he attributed this growth to the continued growth of Fandango.
The other factor that has helped propel Fandango over the last few years is a website that has become a standard industry in Hollywood: The rotten tomatoes.
For 21 years, Rotten Tomatoes has been around for a long time, but now it's a stripper start-up created to compile reviews of Jackie Chan's films, and it's become the most important studio that uses its symbol of tomato "fresh" as the foundation of its marketing campaigns. This jump to the status of household name has been greatly facilitated by the Fandango since the acquisition of the site in 2016.
But it has been necessary to make major changes in recent years for both Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango. And Yanover took us behind the scenes of recent major decisions.
Systematically make rotten tomatoes more relevant
Rotten tomatoes has often attracted a lot of attention because of filmmakers' comments on how the service harms the art of cinema, like those of Brett Ratner in 2017 or Martin Scorsese later that year. . But in recent years, the company has made its own headlines after internally reviewing to see if it was serving its audience properly and making changes based on its results.
Last year, Rotten Tomatoes completely changed the way it controls new critics by focusing more on individual reviews than on the publications for which they write. One of the main reasons was that in today's critical world, many of the best are freelancers instead of working with staff. There was also the problem of diversity in the pool of critics approved by Rotten Tomato.
Read more: The 15 films that interest us the most after viewing footage at CinemaCon, the largest cinema conference
"What we focused on, do the critics represent the diversity that is the audience but also the journalism?" said Yanover, president since 2012. "If we want to be useful to the public, they want to know that a partition is made up of young people, old people, whites and not whites, men and women Because the public is all that. "
Since last August, more than 500 new reviews have been added to bring more variety to rotten tomatoes, including critics who do not write, but write reviews by video or podcast.
This year, we went on to discuss the question of public score, which, according to Yanover, has been observed by Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes for some time in the process of getting around the release of certain films. In the latter case, it was "Captain Marvel", the first film directed by a woman. Internet trolls had deliberately lowered the audience score on the Rotten Tomatoes movie page before it opened.
In response to this, Fandango announced that all Rotten Tomato 's audience scores would not be visible until the films were available to the public. He also said that he would use ways to make sure that audience members giving reviews or sheet music on the site could verify that they saw the movie well.
"We saw that it sometimes became a display board," Yanover said about the audience score. "They do not even talk about the movie, they talk about their feelings that the film has provoked.We thought that it could not be helpful to listen to people who were speculating on something that was wrong. they did not see, or worse, talk about the subject, so we talked about it. "
Yanover said that responding to both the diversity of critics about rotten tomatoes and the changes made when the public's score became visible was not a stand-alone decision. For example, he said that "Captain Marvel", having a lot of "high frequency noise", was not the deciding factor to make this announcement. Instead, it is the result of the fact that the company has been constantly searching for an existing site for 21 years.
"We want to be honest and transparent, I'm very proud of that," said Yanover.
But it is not really a "mission accomplished" in Fandango.
Become everything for the viewer (except a movie subscription provider)
"Our feeling is that if you're in the movie business, the tickets are a limitation," said Yanover. "We love the theatrical experience, it's the greatest thing we do, but if we want to be the subject of the movies, we have to be involved in the movies at home. last five years is to reinvent ourselves not a company that sells movie tickets but as a company that serves consumers around their entertainment. "
The acquisition of rotten tomatoes is certainly the greatest example of Yanover's mission. But the site also owns the YouTube MovieClips channel, which has over 24 million subscribers and offers a deep endless dive into movie clips and trailers. And there is also FandangoNow, which allows you to buy, rent and watch over 80,000 movies and TV shows online and on mobile devices (many of which are not yet available on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime).
At a time when streaming options are only growing with the arrival of Disney + and Apple in the space, Yanover is proud to boast: "We are the only retailer in America to sell movies on all platforms, all windows, at all prices. "
But there is one area in which Fandango is not yet located: subscriptions to movie tickets. Although Yanover's competitor, Atom Tickets, has recently announced that it would provide cinemas with its technology to help individual theaters launch their own subscription programs, Yanover is not ready to put his hat in the ring.
"The unknown question is what is the right balance between price and scale," he said. "I consider AMC as the most advanced to find the right price / product / market ratio.We are much more able to support the industry – AMC List A users use the Fandango – than Assert is going to subscribe millions of tickets.I am more focused on the retailer that serves everyone on all platforms. "
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