Warner Bros. Acquires Social Movie Site Flixster (And Rotten Tomatoes)
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group has acquired social movie discovery site Flixster. The acquisition also includes Rotten Tomatoes, a movie review site Flixster acquired from News Corp. last year.
Context & Ripple Effects
Flixster had been circling a sale for years — talks surfaced back in 2007, and just this past March BoomTown reported early acquisition conversations with Yahoo and other suitors. Instead, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group lands the company, taking Flixster together with Rotten Tomatoes, the review site Flixster bought out of News Corp. in the tangle around MySpace that BoomTown untangled in late 2009.
The price was never in the press release, but syndicated reporting on the internal memo pegged the sale at $60 million. The strategic logic sits in the combination: a studio home-entertainment arm now owns both a large social movie-discovery audience and the review brand audiences consult before deciding what to watch.
First-order effects
- Warner Bros. gains a direct-to-consumer discovery and marketing channel — Flixster's social apps plus Rotten Tomatoes' review aggregation — that it can point at its own theatrical and home-video releases.
- Yahoo, reportedly in early acquisition talks with Flixster as recently as March 2011, loses the asset to a studio buyer, ending Flixster's run as an independent discovery property.
Second-order effects
- Rival studios whose releases rise or fall on Tomatometer scores now have their most-cited review aggregator housed inside a competing studio, inviting questions about how prominently they showcase RT badges and whether independent alternatives gain appeal.
- Other studios facing the same push toward owning their digital storefronts may follow Warner's lead with their own consumer-platform acquisitions, extending the path Sony took when it bought a video site back in 2006.
Third-order effects
- If studios keep buying the demand-generation layer — discovery, reviews, social recommendation — independent review aggregation migrates inside distributor marketing organizations, putting structural pressure on the perceived neutrality of scores like the Tomatometer.
- The deal marks home-entertainment groups shifting from licensing content through third-party platforms toward building owned pipelines to movie audiences, a consolidation pattern likely to draw regulator and exhibitor attention as it spreads.
The trend: Studios are acquiring the consumer-facing discovery and review layer outright as their home-entertainment arms build owned channels for reaching movie audiences directly.