Flixster, the movie social networking site built on the idea of movie lovers being able to rate the films they’ve seen, has announced that it’s going to buy Rotten Tomatoes, the site that gathers together reviews by critics and then sees whether overall they like or dislike it.
Previously Rotten Tomatoes was part of the Fox owned IGN Entertainment newtork, and there were reports recently that rather than Flixster buying Rotten Tomatoes, Fox would purchase Flixster and somehow tie it all up with another of its websites, MySpace. However while Fox will take a minority stake in both Fixster and Rotten Tomatoes following the deal, the current plan is to keep both properties operating independently and there’s no news of anything to do with MySpace.
It’s a deal that makes sense, as while many media companies like to buy websites that seem to have little to do with their core business, Rotten Tomatoes allows Flixster to offer movie opinions from both users and critics and provide a more complete service, or, as the press release announcing the deal puts it, “Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes give movie audiences an unprecedented total picture of movie trends and opinions, combining half a million reviews from leading critics with 2.3 billion user ratings and reviews.” (You can read the full press release here)
Flixster’s success has largely been down to the power of harnessing everything from Facebook to the iPhone to build easy to access film social networking tools across a variety of websites, so they may be thinking they can do something similar for Rotten Tomatoes. After all, in only three years Flixster has built itself from nothing to 20 million monthly users, so they should certainly be able to do some interesting things with a brand like Rotten Tomatoes.