Flixster

» see flixster.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

flixster is the name almost nobody kept, but for six years it owned the one everybody did. really though, i knew rotten tomatoes from ankara the way most people did, as a number sitting next to a film. i never once thought about the company underneath it. that company was flixster, a san francisco site from 2006 that let you rate films and see what your friends were watching.

joe greenstein and saran chari started it in january 2006. its real growth came as a facebook app during the early platform gold rush, when a movie-rating widget on your profile was a normal thing to have. by 2010 flixster had bought rotten tomatoes and turned into a movie-data company with actual weight behind it. warner bros picked up the whole operation in 2011.

the end came through a bigger fish. in february 2016 fandango bought flixster and rotten tomatoes off warner. rotten tomatoes was the asset it wanted, and flixster itself was surplus. the streaming locker got pushed onto vudu in august 2017, and in december fandango emailed users that everything would stop on february 20, 2018. the site went dark on schedule and pointed at fandango.com. in turkey it was never really a destination anyway. we had imdb for the number and the old habit of just downloading the film. flixster was a us social-movie product for a us facebook crowd i was not part of.

~ the case file ~

~ the funny part ~

the thing flixster bought outlived the company that bought it, and got far more famous doing it. rotten tomatoes is now a shorthand people argue about, a score studios put on posters. flixster is a dead login screen almost nobody remembers typing. the parent got erased and the child became a household word.

~ what it became ~

fandango kept rotten tomatoes and killed the rest. the flixster app, the ratings community, the video locker, all of it either shut or got redirected into fandango and vudu. the movie-social-network idea that flixster ran on did not survive the move to phones, where people ended up rating films inside letterboxd and imdb instead. by the time it closed, flixster was mostly a legal footnote in someone else's acquisition.

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