Warner Bros. buys Rotten Tomatoes parent Flixster

 

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group said it had struck an agreement to buy Flixster, the parent company of Rotten Tomatoes, a website that analyzes movie reviews, awarding films a given number of tomatoes. So the next time a Warner Bros. movie gets bad reviews, the studio should be the first to know about it.

Flixster also owns a popular social media site devoted to entertainment. Overall, Flixster has around 25 million users.

Warner Bros. said it planned to use the "powerful Flixster brand and technical expertise to launch a number of initiatives designed to grow digital content ownership."

In a call with analysts to discuss first quarter earnings, Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes said, the comnpany would develop a platform to sell movies from all studios in "an agnostic way that will benefit the whole industry."

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

-- Joe Flint

For the record: This post was updated to include remarks on the purchase from Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes.

Related Post: Warner Bros. in advance talks to buy Flixster

Comments

[Michael]

Too bad is was Warner and not News Corp. Then we could have said that the Fox owns the hen house.

[Markus Eliance]

What an amazing conflict of interest. I feel like this will create a situation similar to what IGN ended up with when a staff writer gave an unfavorable review to a game -- Kane and Lynch 2 -- which was being advertised on the site. That writer was fired. It'll be interesting to see if Rotten Tomatoes can maintain its integrity.