Last week, I got sent a tweet accusing DiscussingFilm of never posting the Rotten Tomatoes score for a new Universal film, or a single negative review, implying Universal had paid them off.
It's not hard to find other examples:
A post last week saying 'Every now and then DiscussingFilm posts something that you can tell they were paid to post' has over 18,000 likes.
Another from August, asking whether DiscussingFilm is 'paid by studios, managers and PR companies', has almost 13,000.
And the replies under the accounts' own posts are full of lines like 'willing to bet Disney paid them for this', 'Undisclosed paid advertisement' and 'Not beating the paid shill allegations here'.
These are just tweets, and prove nothing on their own. But they do touch a nerve for many, as movie fans often claim that large social media accounts are being influenced by money from distributors.
On its face, the accusations are at least plausible. These accounts do need to earn income, and Hollywood distributors have big marketing budgets. But it’s also unfair to impugn accounts that millions of people enjoy, especially without evidence. So I set out to uncover what the data can reveal.
I looked at the social coverage from major film accounts for every film that opened in North America on 2,000 or more screens between January 2021 and February 2026.
Why do people suspect these accounts?
The suspicion doesn’t come from nowhere. Studios do pay people to post about films, and they’re fairly open about it.
In 2023, The Hollywood Reporter spoke to creators who post from premieres on behalf of studios. One said her deals had ranged from $3,000 to $10,000 per partnership.
The following year TheWrap reported that studios had started screening films for influencers before critics, so that the first reactions online would come from what it called a ‘less discerning’ crowd.
A New York Magazine investigation in 2023 found that a PR agency paid a small number of reviewers to cover the 2018 film Ophelia, which helped lift it to a ‘fresh’ rating. The firm’s founder denied any conspiracy, saying a ‘small handful’ of the writers on its list had set up a system where filmmakers could pay to be reviewed.
When Universal announced that The Odyssey would skip the influencer ‘word of mouth’ screenings, The Hollywood Reporter noted that:
Fans have gotten savvier about the relationship between studio marketing departments and influencers.
Some of the big film accounts are part of that economy.
In August, a Creator Spotlight profile of the founder of Culture Crave listed Lionsgate and Sony among his recent clients and said that his revenue is:
Primarily generated through partnerships with movie studios or agencies representing those studios.
The accounts also turn up in the studios’ own marketing. When Netflix took out awards adverts for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein last winter, the first quote on the page (’Astounding prosthetics’) was credited to DiscussingFilm.
So when one of these accounts opts not to post news that could damage the box office, people connect the dots.
Which accounts post scores at all?
I started with 25 accounts on X that post film news, from fan-run aggregators to trade outlets. Most of them barely post scores. Culture Crave posted one for about one wide release in six, Pop Crave and Pop Base did so for fewer than one in ten, and Variety, IGN and IndieWire almost never did.
Three accounts post scores often enough to measure, i.e. between 43% and 46% of the films. They are:
DiscussingFilm (3.2 million followers)
Film Updates (1.6 million followers)
The Hollywood Handle (176,000 followers)
I also added the official Rotten Tomatoes X account (2.6 million followers) as a comparison, because it posts its own scores.
The chart below shows how many of the 435 wide releases each account tweeted about the film’s Rotten Tomatoes score, split by how good or bad the score was. If an account posted good and bad news equally, its four bars would be roughly level.
They aren’t level, except for The Hollywood Handle. DiscussingFilm and Film Updates both post the score for roughly half of the well-reviewed films and under a third of the worst ones.
The Rotten Tomatoes account is the most selective of the four. It posted the score for 71% of films rated 80% or higher and just 19% of films rated under 40%.
The biggest predictor of whether an account posts a score is how many screens the film opened on. For DiscussingFilm, doubling the screen count multiplied the odds of a score post by about 14.
Do they ignore the bad films entirely?
The accounts still post about ‘bad’ movies - it’s just their Rotten Tomatoes score that sometimes gets dropped.
DiscussingFilm posts about 76% of ‘bad’ films (i.e. those rated under 40%) and 86% of ‘good’ ones (80% or higher).
So these accounts don’t pretend bad films don’t exist. They post the trailer, the first look and the casting news, and what they’re less likely to do is post the score once it comes in low.
Of the 79 films rated under 40%, DiscussingFilm covered 36 without ever posting the score. Film Updates did the same for 35.
Does it matter whose film it is?
To see whether this under-reporting of scores was linked to certain companies, I split the films by studio and compared the share of rotten films (under 60%) and fresh films (60% or higher) each account posted.
If an account were protecting one studio, that studio’s rotten films would sit well to the right of everyone else’s, close to its fresh ones.
DiscussingFilm posted the score for 46% of Universal’s rotten films and 48% of its fresh ones - not really a bias there. The studio with the highest share of rotten scores posted on both accounts is Disney (57% on DiscussingFilm and 64% on Film Updates), whose rotten films were posted about as often as its fresh ones. The lowest among the big studios was Lionsgate, where DiscussingFilm posted 3 of 20 rotten scores.
But once score and screen count are accounted for, studio doesn’t change the odds of a score post for any of the three accounts, and the tilt towards good scores isn’t steeper for any one studio.
The bigger gaps you can see in the chart (Film Updates posted 75% of Warner Bros. fresh scores and 35% of its rotten ones, for example) are the kind that turn up by chance when you cut 435 films into 14 small groups, some with only 11 films in them.
The account making the most aggressive move toward reporting only good news is Rotten Tomatoes itself.
The interesting thing is that Rotten Tomatoes isn't independent of the studios - it's owned by the parent companies of two of them. NBCUniversal's Fandango is the majority owner of the site, with Warner Bros. owning the remaining 25%.
And yet, its owners get very different treatment. Warner Bros.’ bad scores are posted more often, while Universal’s are posted far less often (20% vs 57% for Warner Bros.), which puts Universal in the bottom half of the major studios.
Working against their own interests
At this point you may be wondering if the accounts post fewer bad scores because their audience doesn’t want to read about them.
The data says the opposite: people on X view bad news at a much higher rate than good news.
So the accounts post fewer of the scores that get the most attention.
Conclusion
The big film accounts on X do lean towards good news, posting the score for about half of well-reviewed wide releases and under a third of badly reviewed ones.
They do cover news about bad films, but they don’t shout about the score.
It’s not a response to what their followers want, as posts about bad scores get more views than posts about good ones.
That said, I couldn’t find any long-term pattern of which studios have their bad reviews underreported.
I feel like there is more to this topic than I uncovered today, so please share your thoughts or ideas in the comments below.
Notes
Today I was looking at the X coverage of movies with North American wide release between January 2021 and February 2026 that reached 2,000 or more screens and have a Rotten Tomatoes critic score - 435 films in all. Release dates, distributors, and screen counts come from OpusData, and critic scores come from OMDb.
Views are shown only for posts from 2023 onward, when X began showing them.
I reached out to all the parties mentioned in this article last week, but none of them replied.
Just wondered if this trend towards good news extends to reviews in The Guardian? I think they always give scores. And whether this is linked to the whole rewarding genius myth over effort in the arts.