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Introducing Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes” for Books

Aggregating reviews from over 70 sources, highlighting america's book reviewers.

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We’re very happy today to announce a new Lit Hub project— Book Marks (you can see it for yourself, right here ). To paraphrase the press release (which is available in full here ):

Book Marks will showcase critics from the most important and active outlets of literary journalism in America, aggregating reviews from over 70 sources—newspapers, magazines, and websites—and averaging them into a letter grade, as well as linking back to their source. Each book’s cumulative grade functions as both a general critical assessment, and, more significantly, as an introduction to a range of voices.

We invite you take a look around the site and see what reviewers think of your favorite new book (or the big new books you weren’t sure you’d read). If you have any questions about how Book Marks works, hopefully we’ll have the answer for at least some of them at the “ how it works ” page, but you can always be in touch at  [email protected] .

Thanks for reading!

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Pen and Glory

Self-publishing, simplified.

• Feb 15, 2022

Best Book Review Sites for 2022

As you build your street team, your review numbers will naturally climb. But getting reviews is hard early on, and even when you’re established, it’s good to have a reliable review service you can lean back on.

Because of Amazon’s ever-changing guidelines for what reviews are legitimate and how readers can enter reviews, many review sites have come and gone over the years, and they often don’t stay around long. Paying for reviews is strictly banned, and so is blatant review-swapping. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t workarounds where you can get extra exposure and a list of detailed, honest reviews testifying to your story.

While the options are constantly changing, here are the top three book review sites of February 2022 with an overview of how they work and what they offer writers.

At its heart, Pubby is karma-based. You get a certain number of “snaps” when you sign up, and you can earn more by reading and reviewing work from other authors. You can use these snaps to boost your own book to reviewers and get more reviews.

Pubby has a lot of unique advantages, including the potential for unlimited reviews and the option to pursue verified purchases—which cost more snaps but look so much better on Amazon! If you want to check it out, Pubby does have a free ten-day trial where you can try their system and get a set of reviews without spending a dime, determining if it’s a good fit for you before you commit to a monthly subscription.

BookSirens is perhaps the most talked-about review site. Its platform focuses not only on getting posted reviews of your book, but on getting influencers to share the word. This means you can get publicity as well as reviews from book bloggers, book Youtubers, BookTokers, as well as micro-influencers from every platform.

BookSirens has two payment options, either per book or per month, meaning that you can fit your promotions to your level and choose to have ongoing campaigns or quick bursts whenever you have a new release.

If you’re looking for something minimal and hands-off, Booksprout is a solid option. Booksprout offers advanced protection against free-book-snatchers and piracy, while still having a large network of reviewers. It’s also largely hands-off, meaning that after you upload your book and choose the date you want reviews by, Booksprout takes care of the rest.

Booksprout also wins on the price front. It has a generous free plan which allows up to twenty reviews per book. While there is no good way to enforce that every ARC taken will get a review, reviewers are held up to strict expectations, and it is possible to kick out reviewers who never leave reviews.

How do you get early reviews for your books? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section below. You can also click on the blue button for further discussion on my Facebook group for self-publishing fiction writers.

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Are there any good book review sites january 19, 2008 7:02 pm   subscribe.

A revolution in book reviews: The 'Rotten Tomatoes for books'

Every week, The Thread tackles your book questions, big and small. Ask a question now.

What is this new review site, billed as the "Rotten Tomatoes" for books?

If you love movies, you've probably browsed Rotten Tomatoes, the film review aggregation site which pulls together reviews from hundreds of critics. The site averages the reviews, and presents a score for each film ("rotten" or "fresh.")

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Now, Lit Hub , a site devoted to all things literary, has created a similar resource for books. The project is called Book Marks , and it pulls from 70 different sources, including newspapers, magazines and websites. When a book receives at least 3 reviews, Book Marks pulls them together and gives the average.

Instead of ranking them by produce freshness though, it capitalizes on your report card anxiety and doles out A's, B's, C's, D's and F's. You can find the whiz kids and the flunk-outs of the year's publishing class. That's the theory anyway. So far, this year's books are passing with flying colors: Of approximately 500 books on the site, you'll have to dig to find even a C. A's and B's abound in this class of overachievers.

This, of course, raises the question: Can the books all really be this good? Or are reviewers only writing about books they liked? And, of course, there's the third option: Are reviewers just overly kind in the modern era? Is no one savaging books anymore? (Other than Amazon users, who dispense one-star reviews with abandon.)

As Lit Hub sees it, the site isn't just about ranking. It's also about discovery — both discovering books, and discovering critical voices.

"We understand it is difficult to summarize the nuance and complexity of a review into a letter grade," said Lit Hub editor-in-chief Jonny Diamond said in a press release. "But we believe that Book Marks will lead more readers to reviews, and amplify critics' voices in a way that benefits readers and writers alike."

Now There’s a Rotten Tomatoes for Books, and It’s Called Book Marks

Literary Hub, colloquially known as LitHub , launched little more than a year ago, in April of 2015. Yet, through extensive relationships with authors and other literary publications around the web, the site has already established itself as one of the internet’s premier spots for book news and writing. And it’s only about to become more popular, most likely, as the site has just announced (and launched!) Book Marks , a criticism aggregator that gathers writing from around the internet (and print publications), smooshes all the pieces together, and then creates a nifty letter grade that represents the overall quality of a book.

If this approach sounds familiar, that’s because it’s essentially the same thing Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have been doing for film, television, movies, and video games for years. If you’re wary of the idea that a book can be summarized by a letter grade, never fear: LitHub’s editor-in-chief, Jonny Diamond, knows where you’re coming from.

“We understand it is difficult to summarize the nuance and complexity of a review into a letter grade,” he said in a statement. “But we believe that Book Marks will lead more readers to reviews, and amplify critics’ voices in a way that benefits readers and writers alike.”

The site is live now. Also, it’s worth noting that this is in no way associated with Bookmarks , the bimonthly magazine that was founded in 2002 and “ summarizes and distills published book reviews and includes articles covering classic and contemporary authors, ‘best-of’ genre reading lists, reader recommendations, and book group profiles.”

iDreamBooks Review Site: Rotten Tomatoes For Books?

Could iDreamBooks , a new review aggregation site, be the Rotten Tomatoes for books?

Determining what to read can be tricky, and we each have our go-to methods: Scouring the new release shelves at stores, consulting The New York Times ' bestseller list, clicking "You May Also Like" suggestions on Amazon .

Word-of-mouth recommendations reign supreme, as evidenced by "50 Shades of Grey"'s sudden surge of sales before the book was even sold to a major publisher. This phenomenon seems less common in the film industry, possibly because movie reviews are easier to quantify. There are star ratings and the easy-to-consult site, Rotten Tomatoes , to guide viewers towards the most critically acclaimed flicks.

iDreamBooks, a site openly inspired by Rotten Tomatoes, has created a system that aims to aggregate and streamline book reviews, giving new releases from the big six publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, Random House, and Simon & Schuster) a percentage rating. Like its popular film equivalent, the iDreamBooks team decides whether a certain review is positive or negative using both automated and manual techniques, and compiles the ratings to determine a book's critical merit.

It is the first site of its kind, although it's comprable to Goodreads , which gives books a star ranking based on crowd-sourced comments rather than professional reviews.

"This is a challenging endeavor because there are a lot more books that come out than other verticals like movies," co-founder Rahul Simha told The Huffington Post . "And the release date of these books isn't very standardized (most movies tend to get released on Fridays, for instance). Also, the lack of star rating makes it tough. Because of all these reasons, I think others haven't done it before."

We can think of a few other reasons why the project may be tricky.

The site gives Danielle Steel's romance novel, "Betrayal," an 87% ranking, and Téa Obreht's National Book Award nominee, "The Tiger's Wife," only 67%. This is likely because book reviewers function differently than movie reviewers: Because of the quantity of books produced each year and the time it takes to read them, it's uncommon for a reviewer to cover every big hit. Reviewers have fortes. There are a slew devoted solely to romance or sci-fi or fantasy. Even the big-wigs like Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times and Michael Dirda of The Washington Post ("the most well-read man in America") are choosey. Movie reviewers, on the other hand, are less-so; Rogert Ebert recently covered both "Ice Age Continental Drift" and "Elena," a film he describes as "Dostoyevsky meets film noir." Therefore comparing E.L. James to E.B. White is like comparing apples to oranges.

Although iDreamBooks currently only features books by major publishers, they plan to expand to include smaller publishers and classics.

"We are working towards becoming the site people visit before buying a book," Simha says.

Check out these images of iDreamBooks and let us know what you think of the project!:

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I Want a Real Rotten Tomatoes for Books

James Wallace Harris

James Wallace Harris is a retired computer guy. Jim dreamed of writing science fiction in his social security years, but discovered he loved writing essays more. Life is short and novels are long. He’s written over a thousand essays for his blog Auxiliary Memory . Jim wrote about science fiction for SF Signal before it folded, and now for Worlds Without End. BookRiot gives him the opportunity to write about all the other kinds of books he loves. Finally, he has all the time in the world to read and write, but he never forgets poor Henry Bemis. (Who also found time enough at last, until an evil Twilight Zone fate took it all away.) Twitter: @JimHarris28

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When Literary Hub’s  Book Marks first appeared, it was touted as Rotten Tomatoes for books. That hasn’t worked out. MetaCritic doesn’t cover books. Why isn’t there a Rotten Tomatoes for books? Bookworms need a site that charts the progress of every book published. Tragically, books are published faster than they can find readers. We need better tools for tracking the success of what we should be reading. Masterpieces go unnoticed, brilliant scholarship ignored, all because of the inefficiency of how readers discover books.

How would you design the perfect meta-data site for books? Here’s how I imagine it. I go to MetaBookReviews  (I made up this title). It offers a control panel of options for searching for books. The site allows user to search for a single title or generate lists of books by conditional filters. I picture the home page as a data control center with radio buttons and selector boxes.

One filter is the time selector. This week, this month, this year, last year, this decade, 19th century, etc. I pick last year. It asks me to choose between fiction and nonfiction. I pick fiction. It offers me a list of genres. I pick science fiction. It asks for type, and I select novels. It asks me theme, and I pick space opera. I then press Go. I get a list of space opera novels published in 2015. The site should collect data on any book with an ISBN.

Next, I’m offered a selector to choose the way I want my list ordered. I could choose cover view, and see an array of covers. People really do judge books by their covers. I could list by rating, like we see at Rotten Tomatoes . Or I could list by title, author, date published, etc.

What I want is the list ordered by total number of book reviews. This was what Book Marks could have done, but didn’t. They limit themselves to reviews from major sites, and collect too few reviews. I’d want reviews from any online publication that published a significant review. I mentioned this idea to my friend Mike, and he spent weeks using Python and Natural Language Processing Toolkit to see if he could post-process Google returns and identify significant book reviews. It’s hard. People write about books in dozens of ways, and that throws off the program. The best accuracy Mike could get at identifying solid book reviews was around 80%. That could be improved, and with human curation, a database could be developed that linked book titles to reviews, thus providing counts.

If I’m presented with a list of forty 2015 space opera books, and a few at the top have a dozen or more reviews, and the bottom half have no reviews, which titles do you think I’ll click on? What if I wanted to review unknown books?

Picture the returned list as a table, and one column is the number of reviews, but other columns include Amazon customer ratings (average stars/number of reviews), Goodreads ratings (average stars, number of ratings, number of reviews), Worlds Without End (number of lists the book is on, number of awards and nominates), or maybe Internet Science Fiction Database (number of editions). These sites are specific to science fiction, so data sources for other genres would be used elsewhere. If I click on a title, I should see all the meta-data for that book, including a list of links to all its book reviews. See sample below.

Lists are another way people are persuaded to buy books, like those here at Book Riot. When looking at title entries at  MetaBookReviews, I should see a list of all the lists the book has appeared on. See sample below.

All these sources of meta-data go into providing a metric for measuring the attention a book is getting. That’s usually the best indicator, but not the only one. I asked for space opera books. Just seeing a list of all space opera novels for 2015 might inspire me to try books that aren’t getting attention. I’d also love to be able to filter those books by their sub-themes. Often I’m in the mood to read a book that covers a particular subject. That could sell more books.

To illustrate my point, I’ve picked The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.

Quantitative Data

Book Reviews

Searching on Google [“The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet” Chambers Review] gets 16,000 returns. Obviously, there hasn’t been 16,000 book reviews written for The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet . But how many genuine reviews were written? That’s what my friend Mike was trying to find out with his programming project. If there was a MetaBookReviews to collect them, either via AI or human curation, wouldn’t that be a valuable tool? Rotten Tomatoes often finds well over a hundred reviews for a movie, why don’t books get as many reviews?

If the book was nonfiction, it could also curate lists of scholarly articles about the book.

Of course this is just a small sample, but a quick glance reveals a lot.

Can you imagine having a site like MetaBookReviews ? Think about all the ways you could mine information. Or just think how convenient it would be to look up a book title and have all that information in one place. When I want to know about a movie I go directly to Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb,  and bypass Google. That’s what makes a successful app, when it’s a single, best source of information.

Many existing web sites could offer these features. For science fiction, Worlds Without End or ISFDB could add these features. Another logical place would be Wikipedia . I assume Book Marks hoped to be this site, but they don’t collect enough data yet. They could expand into this system too. And if you think about it, Amazon could do this too, either at their main site or Goodreads. Sooner or later, someone will do this. It’s just obvious in the evolution of big data.

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IMDb vs. Rotten Tomatoes vs. Metacritic: Which Movie Ratings Site Is Best?

IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic are the three most popular ratings sites for movies, but they aren't all equal.

Thanks to online ratings, it's easier than ever to know whether or not a movie is worth watching. A quick Google search brings up plenty of websites offering their opinions on the latest films.

The three most popular are IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic. But how do these sites differ, and which should you trust for information on movies? Here's everything you need to know.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is a gigantic compendium of movies, TV shows, and video games. Its primary use is to find detailed information about any actor, producer, or piece of media content.

When you pull up a movie, you'll see a synopsis, trailers, photos, a cast list, trivia, and much more. What makes IMDb so useful is its cross-referencing. Upon opening the page for an actor, you'll see their best-known roles. Thus, IMDb is great for those "what else have I seen her in?" moments.

The IMDb mobile app takes this a step further. If you create an account and give ratings to movies and other media, you'll see a You may know them from field on an actor's page if you've rated something they appeared in.

With a free IMDb account, you can also create a Watchlist of movies you want to see. Along with contributing to the 10-point rating scale with other users, IMDb has many other useful features to offer if you're interested.

Pros of IMDb

Unlike the other two sites, IMDb's reviews come solely from users. It only takes a minute to sign up for IMDb and leave a review, so there's little barrier to entry.

Thus, IMDb's biggest strength is that its scores gives you a good idea of what normal consumers think of it. Professional critics have no influence on IMDb scores.

IMDb has a weighted average system to prevent users from rigging the score, but the service doesn't make it clear exactly how this works. Click the review count next to the star icon on any movie's page to see a breakdown of how people rated it.

Below the overall star average, you can see how the ratings break down by a few demographics, including age and gender.

Cons of IMDb

IMDb's biggest problem is that like other platforms, most people only leave reviews if they love or hate a film. Thus, this skews the scores in favor of either fanboys or haters.

People who want to boost a movie's perception will likely rate the movie a 10, while those who didn't like it will give a rating of one. This means you should read a handful of reviews to get a full picture of the movie's quality.

Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes is a trusted source for movie reviews sourced from critics. Every movie uses the "Tomatometer" to score the quality of a film. If the critic liked the movie, a red tomato appears by their review. When they don't like it, you'll see a green splat instead.

As long as 60 percent or more of critics like the movie, it earns an overall Fresh score with a red tomato. If under 60 percent of critics rate the movie favorably, it earns a Rotten score with a green splat.

Meanwhile, a Certified Fresh badge appears next to titles that are of particularly high quality. They must hold at least a 75 percent favorable score after 80 reviews, including at least five from top critics.

Open any movie's page, and you'll see the overall score plus its number of reviews at the top. Click See Score Details for a deeper breakdown. The Critics Consensus , present for most movies, is a great summary of why the movie received its score.

Rotten Tomatoes also providers a user score, shown by the popcorn bucket. When at least 60 percent of users rated it 3.5 stars (out of 5) or higher, it shows a full bucket. A tipped-over bucket represents that under 60 percent of users gave it under 3.5 stars. Since you can use half-star ratings, this is close to the IMDb score.

In 2019, Rotten Tomatoes made some changes to reduce "review bombing" of movies. There's no longer a Want to See percentage, and you'll also see a check next to user reviews where the site has confirmed that the person actually bought a ticket to the movie.

At the bottom of a movie's page, you can read excerpts from the critic reviews, filter by fresh or rotten, or only show top critics. Search for your favorite actors, and you can check the scores of films they appeared in.

Related: Sites Like Rotten Tomatoes to Find Average Ratings and Reviews for Anything

Pros of Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes has the advantage of sourcing its reviews from trusted critics. The Rotten Tomatoes criteria page explains that the site only takes reviews from trusted newspapers, podcasts, and websites. In theory, this means that only the opinions of the most-trusted movie critics influence the Rotten Tomatoes review.

The Top Critic designation lets you filter by the absolute best critics if you prefer. You can't get a more professional opinion than from these folks.

Overall, Rotten Tomatoes does a good job of letting you know at a glance whether or not a movie is worth your time. The easily identifiable icons, overall score, and consensus summary only take a moment to scan.

Cons of Rotten Tomatoes

The biggest issue with Rotten Tomatoes is that it breaks down complex opinions into a Yes or No score. It scores a critic who thought the movie was decent but had some flaws (say, a 59 percent rating) the same as one who thought the movie was absolute garbage (a zero percent score).

You'll notice this with the Average Rating under the score. Take Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle as an example. Of the 232 critic reviews, 177 of them are positive. This gives the movie a score of 76 percent. However, the critics rated the movie an average of 6.2/10---quite a bit under the 76 percent displayed on the page.

This doesn't mean the scores on Rotten Tomatoes are useless, of course. But it's important to remember that there's nuance in individual reviews, and the Fresh/Rotten system effectively turns every rating into a 100 or 0 score.

Metacritic aggregates reviews of movies and TV shows, plus video games and music albums. It's one of the best sites for gamers , but it can give you a good idea on the quality of movies too.

The site collects reviews from many sources and aggregates them into one "metascore" from 0 to 100. It displays a color and one-line indication of quality based on the overall score, with the following used for movies, TV, and albums:

• 81-100: Universal Acclaim (Green)
• 61-80: Generally Favorable Reviews (Green)
• 40-60: Mixed or Average Reviews (Yellow)
• 20-39: Generally Unfavorable Reviews (Red)
• 0-19: Overwhelming Dislike (Red)

Unlike Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic uses a weighted average system. Nobody knows the exact details, but the service assigns more importance to some sources than others. Like the other two sites, Metacritic also includes a separate user score, which does not influence the critic score.

The Pros of Metacritic

Metacritic avoids the Rotten Tomatoes problem of scoring every review as simply "good" or "bad." A review of 50 percent gets mixed in with the rest to create the metascore. Thus, the score you see on Metacritic is closer to the average review, as opposed to the percentage of critics who simply liked the movie on Rotten Tomatoes.

Additionally, among these three sites, Metacritic is the only one to feature full user reviews right next to critic reviews. This makes it easy to compare what the general public thinks compared to the professionals.

The Cons of Metacritic

While it's easy to translate a score from a five-star or 10-point scale, Metacritic's way of translating letter grade is questionable. We can see how this works on the About Metascores page :

While scoring an A as 100 percent makes sense, note the scores for B- and F , for instance. A 67 percent score for a B- seems a bit harsh. In most schools, a score of 67 percent is closer to an F than it is a B- .

And scoring an F as 0 percent seems unfair. Something like 20 percent for an F might be more appropriate. Because every site has different scales for scoring (some might not even use pluses and minuses), this could skew a reviewer's original meaning.

Also, unlike Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic seems to have few public standards. There's no detailed information on where it sources it critics from. Thus, the score potentially doesn't have as much weight behind it as Rotten Tomatoes does.

What Is the Best Movie Rating Website?

So we've now taken a look at IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic, and listed their major pros and cons. As you might have guessed, there's no one website that's best for everything.

However, we can recommend each of these sites for different reasons:

• IMDb is great for seeing what general audiences think of a movie. If you don't care what the critics say and want to see what people like yourself thought of a film, then you should use IMDb. Just be aware that fans often skew the vote with 10-star ratings, which may inflate scores somewhat.
• Rotten Tomatoes offers the best overall picture of whether a movie is worth seeing at a glance. If you only trust the opinions of top critics and just want to know if a movie is at least decent, you should use Rotten Tomatoes. While the Fresh/Rotten binary can oversimplify the often complex opinions of critics, it should still help you weed out lousy films.
• Metacritic offers the most balanced aggregate score. If you don't mind which critics' opinions go into the final score and prefer seeing a general average, then you should use Metacritic. Its standards are mostly unknown, but Metacritic makes it easy to compare professional and user reviews side-by-side.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with checking all three of these sites every time you're thinking of seeing a movie. Over time, you should figure out which site's tastes most match yours; then you'll know which is best for you personally.

Personal Taste Still Matters Most

Remember that movie scores aren't everything. All three of these sites don't, for instance, paint an accurate picture of movies that are so bad they're good. Because those movies are objectively terrible, they carry low scores even though they have ironic value.

Plus, it's impossible to sum up complex opinions from dozens of people into a single number. And no matter what the critics or general public think, your preferences might be totally different anyway. There's nothing wrong with enjoying a movie that most people find stupid. So while these sites are helpful, don't take them too seriously.

More From Forbes

Netflix is in a bind with ‘3 body problem’ season 2.

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3 Body Problem

This post was published on 3/23 and republished on 3/25.

Netflix has just debuted its sci-fi epic, 3 Body Problem , this past week, and it’s landed at #2 on the top 10 list in the US. But if you’ve binged through it and finished the show, you’ll know that it ends on a significant cliffhanger, one that demands a season 2. But will it get one? This is Netflix we’re talking about, so there are some things to consider.

It feels like Netflix may end up a bit between a rock and a hard place, given the show’s initial performance here, who’s involved, budgets and other considerations.

The show is an adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, the famed book by Cixin Liu, but one that is a part of a trilogy, which also includes The Dark Forest and Death’s End. As such, the three pieces, much like the three-body problem itself, are meant to fit together and you can’t really just have one or two without the others. When you commit to season 1 of a show like this, you in theory, should be signed up for three seasons. But Netflix did not announce that ahead of time, nor have we seen any sort of day-one renewal here for the show.

This is a very, very important project for Netflix, a service that generally speaking does not commit to all that many high profile, expensive sci-fi projects give that they are so high-risk and expensive. You have Stranger Things, obviously, but Netflix has mostly left sci-fi to Apple TV+. Here, this is an extremely important project given that A) it’s such an acclaimed sci-fi book and B) Two of its three creators are David Benioff and DB Weiss of Game of Thrones fame. Expectations are high.

Reception is…fine? But only fine. Critics are giving it a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes , which is good not great for the higher-skewing scores of TV (Shogun has a 99% on Hulu right now, X-Men 97 a 100%, even Paramount Plus’s Halo show has an 89%). User scores are not terribly good. It has a 64% from viewers, while something like say, The Gentleman on Netflix may have a lower 70% critic score, but a much higher audience score of an 86%. And ultimately, audiences are what matter.

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3 Body Problem has also debuted behind Homicide New York, a true crime show, on Netflix’s US Top 10 list. It’s early, but the sign of a really strong show is usually a #1 debut, and if not, well, you need word of mouth to spread to get it up there. But I’m not sure how “virally recommended” 3 Body Problem is going to be given its exceedingly high concepts. There’s also cost. A show lower down the list might get renewed if it’s cheap and watched enough. But a sprawling, sci-fi epic like 3 Body Problem? That has to perform extremely well.

It’s a really tough balancing act here. This is a very important show with very high profile talent attached in the form of the Game of Thrones duo, and it really needs three seasons to tell the complete story of the famed trilogy. But reception feels like it’s going to be pretty tepid, and Netflix will have to decide just how committed to it they’re going to be.

Update (3/25): 3 Body Problem has indeed made it to #1 on Netflix’s Top 10 list, raising its prospects for a future season, albeit we don’t know it’s actual viewership numbers just yet.

Its creators have, however, been giving interviews strongly indicating that season 2 is in the cards. Though they are still saying “if” not “when.” Here’s David Benioff to THR:

“It’s something we’ve talked about with the Netflix guys, too,” Benioff. “Liu Cixin’s created this indelible trilogy and the books just get better for me. The second book is far better than the first, and the third book just completely blew my mind. The story just gets more and more ambitious as it goes, and it takes a huge leap in book two. So I feel like if we survive to the second season, we’re going to be in a good place.”

That article also states that 3 Body Problem is actually Netflix’s most expensive scripted series ever at $20 million an episode. While I knew it was pricey, I absolutely would not have guessed that at all. Weiss and Benioff’s Netflix deal itself cost at least $200 million. Netflix has indeed killed off shows where they’ve done big deals with creators in the past, but they are usually far more reluctant to do so. This may be one of those cases, especially with a clear three book arc to finish. But again, at what cost? If episodes are $20 million apiece, and they’re doing eight a season ($160 million), that’s half a billion dollars for the entire trilogy.

Again, it feels like Netflix is almost pot-committed, even if the show underperforms. And I absolutely think it’s still probably going to, but we’ll see how it progresses in time.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .

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10 Rotten Movies on Rotten Tomatoes That Are Actually Good

E very now and then, it’s fun to look at websites like Rotten Tomatoes to see how your favorite or least favorite movies did in the critical rating algorithms on which their percentage scores are based. Sometimes, it’s not so fun, especially when one of your most beloved movies ends up saddled with that dreaded green “rotten” rating.

Sure, we don’t all have perfect taste, and most of us love plenty of movies we’d consider more “guilty pleasures” than “actually good,” but sometimes a movie’s low rating feels personal. It’s important to note here that a Rotten Tomatoes score doesn’t automatically mean that a movie is good or bad. It’s basically just a snapshot of the critical praise or derision a film got when it was released, and should be viewed accordingly — especially with older films whose cult appeal has gained them more favor in the ensuing decades.

Still, we’ve seen rotten ratings you wouldn’t believe, and that’s why we’ve decided to scour the depths of Rotten Tomatoes’ lost low-rated movies and choose ten that we think deserve way more than they got. Some of these are more subjective than others—your mileage with a “better than you remember” swashbuckling pirate movie sequel or a paranoid mumblecore Hunter S. Thompson adaptation may vary. But Top Gun ?? They didn’t like Top Gun ?? Blade II ?? Miami Vice ?? Were we even watching the same movie??

Most of these movies got critical and fan appraisal only after they were deemed failures when they opened, and while we wish these had all been appreciated in their time, we’re glad society has finally caught up with the brilliance of Wet Hot American Summer .

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Someone Like You

Based on the novel by #1 NYTimes bestselling author Karen Kingsbury, "Someone Like You" is an achingly beautiful love story. After the tragic loss of his best friend, a grieving young archit... Read all Based on the novel by #1 NYTimes bestselling author Karen Kingsbury, "Someone Like You" is an achingly beautiful love story. After the tragic loss of his best friend, a grieving young architect launches a search for her secret twin sister. Based on the novel by #1 NYTimes bestselling author Karen Kingsbury, "Someone Like You" is an achingly beautiful love story. After the tragic loss of his best friend, a grieving young architect launches a search for her secret twin sister.

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• 5 Critic reviews

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‘Late Night With the Devil’ Review: Selling Your Soul for the Ratings

An occult-obsessed nation is nimbly captured in this found-footage horror film about a late night show gone horribly wrong.

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By Alissa Wilkinson

“Late Night With the Devil” is trimly effective horror of a rare sort: I found myself wishing, halfway through my screening, that I was watching it on my TV. Not because it doesn’t work in a theater — horror almost always benefits from being seen in a crowd — but because its writer-director duo, the brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes, make shrewd use of some of the uniquely creepy things about television, especially its intimacy. The TV set is in your house, and you’re sitting six feet away from it, and especially in the wee hours of the night, whatever’s staring back at you can feel eerie, or impertinent. Over time, the late night TV host becomes your best friend, or a figure that haunts your fitful dreams.

That’s why people watch late night TV, of course: to laugh, to be entertained and to feel some kind of companionship when the rest of the world goes to bed. “Late Night With the Devil” twists that camaraderie around on itself, layering in familiar 1970s horror tropes about demonic possession, Satanism and the occult. The result is a nasty and delicious, unapologetic pastiche with a flair for menace. I had a blast.

The host of the movie’s invented late night talk and variety show is Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a younger, snappier Johnny Carson who is desperate to climb to the top of the ratings. Framed as found footage wrapped in a pseudo-documentary, the film briefly fills us in on Delroy’s career trajectory hosting “Night Owls With Jack Delroy,” a show that can’t quite overtake its competitors. As narration informs us that Delroy is risking going down in history as an also-ran — always Emmy nominated, never the winner — we learn that we’re about to watch the night that “shocked a nation.”

On Halloween night, 1977, the first in the crucial sweeps week for “Night Owls,” Delroy and his producers come up with a desperate, last ditch idea to spike ratings: they design a show full of spectacle that will tap into the cultural craze for all things occult. The guest list that night includes a medium and a skeptic, plus a parapsychologist and the girl she’s been treating for demonic possession. The master tapes have been found, the narrator informs us, and that’s what we’re about to see. Buckle up.

All of these characters seem familiar. Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss), the film’s abrasive skeptic, seems based on James Randi , who appeared on “The Tonight Show” to debunk others’ claims to paranormal abilities, most notably the illusionist Uri Geller in 1973. Randi also confronted mediums on live TV (such as this film’s Christou, played by a hammy Fayssal Bazzi) and was an outspoken critic of parapsychology.

“Late Night With the Devil” also evokes “Michelle Remembers,” the now-discredited 1980 best seller by the psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder about his patient, Michelle Smith, who claimed to have been subjected to ritual satanic abuse. Here the doctor is a parapsychologist played by Laura Gordon, whose performance combines vulnerability and conviction in a fruitful counterbalance to some of the camp. She’s accompanied by her charge, Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), whose oscillation from dead-eyed to vibrant is devilishly disquieting. (If there’s one rule in horror, it’s that there’s nothing creepier than a little girl.)

The film moves a little slowly, unfolding at the speed of the “Night Owls” episode. That’s good. We’re forced to watch it all in real time, just as the audience at home would have, which more or less transforms us into those people in 1977, sitting on the couch in the middle of the night, by turns titillated, captivated and horrified by what’s unfolding on live television. Eventually they — we — are sucked into the whole illusion, an effect I can only imagine is enhanced if you’re watching it all unfold on your actual TV set. You aren’t watching a movie anymore; for a few minutes, you’re part of it.

All of this would have been completely seamless, but for one disappointing formal choice. We’re told the master tape we’re about to watch will be accompanied by previously unseen backstage footage shot during commercial breaks. Though it might have been interesting to leave those scenes out, it makes sense that they’re there — it keeps the film from getting too abstract by filling us in on what’s actually happening between segments.

However, the “footage” is shot in a more traditional shot/reverse shot format, like any film might be, which is weirdly inconsistent with the idea that some rogue cameraman was just hanging out backstage, accidentally capturing footage. Instead it feels scripted, like there were filmmakers present to document the unfolding panic. A more hand-held, one-camera approach might have helped to maintain the movie’s illusion — and made everything far more effectively creepy. (I have a similar quibble with a sequence near the film’s ending, though that feels more subject to the suspension of disbelief.)

But this is relatively minor, in the scheme of things. “Late Night With the Devil” reflects something that movies have often explored — the strangely queasy codependent nature of the live TV host and the audience — through an old trope, which suggests that while you might ask God to save your soul, only the devil will give you what your vanity requires. Invert that, refract it and drag it through sludgy, bloody mud, and you get “Late Night With the Devil”: diabolically good fun.

Late Night With the Devil Rated R: Demons, death and disgusting destruction. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters.

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

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‘we were the lucky ones’ review: joey king and logan lerman in hulu’s stirring holocaust survival drama.

The series based on a novel by Georgia Hunter revolves around a Polish Jewish family scattered across the globe while trying to escape Nazi persecution in the 1940s.

By Angie Han

Television Critic

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Events of the week: 'road house,' 'shirley' and more, hulu at press tour: jon bon jovi, natasha rothwell and the value of personal stories, we were the lucky ones.

We Were the Lucky Ones begins at what will turn out to be the last Passover that the Kurcs are able to celebrate at their family home in Radom, Poland — it’s 1938, and though they can’t know it quite yet, World War II is at their doorstep. By the time the Thomas Kail-directed premiere winds down in 1939, sisters Halina ( Joey King ) and Mila (Hadas Yaron) will remain at home with parents Nechuma (Robin Weigert) and Sol (Lior Ashkenazi), but two brothers, Genek (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) and Jakob (Amit Rahav), will be off at war and a third, Addy ( Logan Lerman ), stuck in Paris. By the end of the finale, this clan will have scattered even further, passing through five different continents over seven years of exile, imprisonment and other struggles.

However, the series is also forced to prioritize blunt efficiency over nuance or depth. Each of the Kurcs is given only the broadest outline of a personality, flattering and vague: they are uniformly clever and brave and generous, their faith in each other unwavering, their romances steadfastly passionate. Notably, they also tend to be spared the cruelest tragedies this series has to dole out — it’s the supporting players, often their wives and husbands, who carry the heaviest burdens of loss and despair.

Still, creator Erica Lipez makes room for smaller, more intimate moments when she can, and these land as sparks of warmth in an otherwise downbeat saga. Scenes like Jakob’s girlfriend Bella (Eva Feiler) and Halina sighing about love letters while hiding out in the woods, or Genek fondly mocking an absent Addy to roars of laughter from his siblings, add texture to the familial bond that’s so essential to these characters. Standouts in the ensemble include Lerman, who crumples inward as Addy’s optimism flags over years without word from his kin, and Sam Woolf as Halina’s boyfriend Adam, particularly electric when he gets to explode in fury or anguish.

The triumphs the characters are able to enjoy by the end of their sojourn feel more than earned, even as the series brushes up against the guilt that accompanies their relative good fortune. “What right have we to expect more?” one person asks after listing all the relatives who’ve survived — as if she feels somehow greedy for living when others did not, or as if merely wishing for the safe return of those still lost might upset the balance of the universe.

But her husband only holds her tighter, replying with what might as well be We Were the Lucky Ones ‘ thesis: “Hope is not a crime. I think it a necessity.” Whatever rough patches it has steered through, whatever trials its characters have suffered, the series makes a moving case for keeping faith in that.

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‘Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2’ Review: This One Has a ‘Story,’ but Beneath the Slasher Violence Its Only Horror Is What It Does to IP

There are three storybook beast creatures this time, but Rhys Frake-Waterfield remains more packager than director.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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• ‘Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2’ Review: This One Has a ‘Story,’ but Beneath the Slasher Violence Its Only Horror Is What It Does to IP 7 days ago

For more than 40 years now, moviegoers have lined up to see the spectacle of people being slaughtered by a psycho with a chainsaw, a psycho in a Halloween mask, a psycho in a goalie mask, a psycho with burnt skin and a striped shirt and fedora, or a psycho with S&M nails in his face. So why not a psycho Winnie the Pooh?

And yet, in its very existence, “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” announced a brave new world of where horror could go. The rights to the Winnie-the-Pooh characters had been owned by the Walt Disney Company since 1966 (at that point, Disney was eating up children’s classics as greedily as Pooh licking out the insides of his honey jar). But the first of the Pooh books, published in 1926, entered the public domain in the U.S. on January 1, 2022, and Rhys Frake-Waterfield started shooting his horror-hack curio just three months later.

His big idea mirrored the sort of thing you used to see in porn videos — when they’re riffs on real movies and have titles like “Pulp Friction” and “Legally Boned.” “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” wasn’t porn, but it was a kind of blood-soaked exploitation cosplay. Its only real horror was to demonstrate how blithely you could reduce cherished IP to trash.

There may be a lot more going on “Blood and Honey 2,” but let’s not kid ourselves. It’s mostly a shambles. One year after the 100 Acre Massacre, everyone in the town of Ashdown blames Christopher Robin for it; they think he committed it. Why anyone would pin this crime on such a nice fellow is beyond me, and the film doesn’t really follow through on that anyway, except to make the point that Chris is now a walking trauma case. In the first film, he was played by Nikolai Leon, who was actually right for the part. Now he’s played by Scott Chambers, who comes on like he’s auditioning to star in “The Ed Sheeran Story.”

There are more creatures this time, and a lot more mayhem — more dismemberings and decapitations and face gougings, especially during the climactic rave sequence, which lays waste to everyone on the dance floor. Pooh (Ryan Oliva), who has been redesigned, still wears his signature overalls and red flannel shirt, but his face looks even gnarlier; he now resembles a homicidal version of Jim Carrey’s Grinch. Owl (Marcus Massey) looks like someone in a royal crow costume out of “Eyes Wide Shut” (and speaks in a voice of aristocratic evil), and Tigger (Lewis Santer), who doesn’t show up until that rave sequence, has a face that (for no good reason) is nearly identical to Pooh’s. But he’s got claws that slash like knives, and his Tiggerish energy may be the closest thing here to a quality linked to the character of legend.

Rhys Frake-Waterfield is, I suppose, a filmmaker, but really he’s a British schlock maven who, in 2021, left his job at an energy company to package low-budget horror films. Within two years, he’d produced 36 features with titles like “The Loch Ness Horror,” “Snake Hotel,” “Alien Invasion,” and “Medusa’s Venom.” Somewhere up in drive-in-theater heaven, Herschell Gordon Lewis and Ed Wood are smiling, even if Frake-Waterfield makes them look like Scorsese and Spielberg. Yet there’s no denying that he’s a canny and ambitious packager. He has announced grand plans to launch the Poohniverse, which will include such movies as “Pinocchio Unstrung,” “Bambi: The Reckoning,” and “Poohniverse: Monsters Assembled.” I doubt audiences will be very unsettled by any of this. But you can bet the IP is trembling.

Reviewed at Regal Union Square, March 26, 2024. MPA rating: Not rated. Running time: 100 MIN.

• Production: A Fathom Events, ITN Distribution release of a Jagged Edge Productions production. Producers: Scott Jeffrey, Rhys Frake-Waterfield. Executive producers: Stuart Alson, Nicole Holland.
• Crew: Director: Rhys Frake-Waterfield. Screenplay: Matt Leslie. Camera: Vince Knight. Editor: Matt Villa. Music: David Hirschfelder.
• With: Scott Chambers, Ryan Oliva, Eddy MacKenzie, Tallulah Evans, Lewis Santer, Marcus Massey, Peter DeSouza-Feighoney, Simon Callow.

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