The year before, there were over films released. The overwhelming nature of choice has dominated the movie market for years now, but the aim of critical review aggregator, Rotten Tomatoes , is to help make that choice a little easier. Rotten Tomatoes was launched in August with the goal of merging critical reviews into an easily-readable and understandable score that viewers could use to determine whether a movie was worth their time or not.
They, in front of IMDB , are one of the most trusted sources for accurate, critical ratings on all your favorite movies. But where exactly do all the critical scores come from? And what do they mean? When you click on a movie on Rotten Tomatoes, the first thing you see are two independent scores. In regards to critical reviews, there are three categories that a film can fall under: rotten, fresh, and certified fresh.
A positive review is usually marked by a score of 6 or more out of 10, but there is also room for interpretation as to what a positive score can be due to the wide variety of rating systems that critics use.
Ultimately, it falls to the curators of Rotten Tomatoes to clarify whether a review is positive or negative, and categorize it as such. As a side note, the overall percentage that you see at the top of the screen is the total amount of reviewers that scored the film positively.
Got it? Rotten Tomatoes deems that all critics meet a set of eligibility guidelines that are meant to exemplify that this person or publication is influential and experienced enough to write well-articulated reviews. They do this through an application-based system with some of the requirements being: you must have been writing reviews for at least two years that are being published through a non-self-published source, whether that be online or print.
To put it simply, most Rotten Tomatoes reviewers are qualified to review films and have already been doing so, consistently, on a different platform. Once a critic has been approved to write for Rotten Tomatoes, they either self-submit reviews to the website or continue to publish reviews via the medium they were previously published through.
Gross, who runs Franchise Entertainment Research, a movie consultancy. In , the average Tomatometer score for all wide releases was 46 per cent, and it was roughly at that level for much of the s. Effectively, the average movie has gone from rotten to fresh in just 10 years. For Gross, who has been following this trend for years, the higher scores fix a longstanding problem with the critic aggregator: it was unfairly critical.
For all of the s, average Tomatometer scores hovered in the decidedly rotten low-to-mids. If 60 per cent is the dividing line between a good film and a bad film, it makes sense to Gross that an unbiased average should fall roughly in the middle. The rising scores can be confusing for viewers who use the site to decide what to watch.
The rising scores come as Rotten Tomatoes has forged close financial ties with the movie industry. The website, launched in by three recent Berkeley grads, was purchased by Warner Bros.
And in , Comcast which also owns NBCUniversal acquired a 70 per cent stake through a deal that turned Rotten Tomatoes into a division of the ticket vendor Fandango. These media conglomerates produce many of the movies and TV shows that are rated on the site. The company that once revelled in its outsider status now occupies a critical position within the movie industry, its scores appearing across the web on Google, iTunes, DirecTV and Fandango.
While Rotten Tomatoes usage among moviegoers has declined in recent years, according to a survey by the National Research Group, the firm estimates that roughly one in four moviegoers still make use of the website. They are either fresh or rotten. They go into a pool. The percentage is the percentage and it is what it is. But exactly how film reviews are classified as rotten or fresh has never been an exact science.
Roughly half of all reviews added to Rotten Tomatoes are self-submitted, which means that the critic or publication specifies whether their review is fresh or rotten, using whatever criteria they like.
For these critics, the company employs a team of curators, seven in all, who read hundreds of reviews a week and mark them fresh or rotten based on their interpretation. When Rotten Tomatoes started in the lates, most professional film critics worked as full-time tenured employees at large publications. Think Siskel and Ebert. Today, the industry is dominated by freelancers, who increasingly write for independent online publications, and so-called influencers, some of whom have no experience in the industry whatsoever — and a lot of the time no knowledge of film history or trends.
All critics rely on studios for access to advanced press screenings. But for freelance critics, press access is by no means guaranteed. In the age of social media, angry movie fans have also grown into a force to be reckoned with.
Read more: Anyone can be an internet troll under the right circumstances — even you, study finds. While movie audiences are growing more diverse , film criticism has long been dominated by white men.
Looking at the top films in , a USC Annenberg report found that 82 per cent of the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes were written by white critics, and 78 per cent by men. Male critics are consistently more harsh than women when it comes to reviewing films with female leads, according to an annual report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. And as most movie critics including myself will tell you, the correlation between Rotten Tomatoes scores, critical opinion, marketing tactics, and actual box office returns is complicated.
So I, along with many other critics , think often of the upsides and pitfalls of aggregating critical opinion and its effect on which movies people see. But for the casual moviegoer, how review aggregators work, what they measure, and how they affect ticket sales can be mysterious. So when I got curious about how people perceive Rotten Tomatoes and its effect on ticket sales, I did what any self-respecting film critic does: I informally polled my Twitter followers to see what they wanted to know.
Here are seven questions that many people have about Rotten Tomatoes, and review aggregation more generally — and some facts to clear up the confusion. The idea is to quickly offer moviegoers a sense of critical consensus. The opinions of about 3, critics — a. In the second case, if the staff isn't sure whether to tag a review as fresh or rotten, they reach out to the critic for clarification. As the reviews of a given film accumulate, the Rotten Tomatoes score measures the percentage that are more positive than negative, and assigns an overall fresh or rotten rating to the movie.
Scores of over 60 percent are considered fresh, and scores of 59 percent and under are rotten. A Rotten Tomatoes score represents the percentage of critics who felt mildly to wildly positively about a given film. When I give a movie a 2. Theoretically, a percent Rotten Tomatoes rating could be made up entirely of middling-to-positive reviews. What Rotten Tomatoes tries to gauge is critical consensus.
But there are always outliers, whether from contrarians who sometimes seem to figure out what people will say and then take the opposite opinion , or from those who seem to love every film.
And critics, like everyone, have various life experiences, aesthetic preferences, and points of view that lead them to have differing opinions on movies. Rotten Tomatoes also lets audiences rate movies, and the score is often out of step with the critical score. Sometimes, the difference is extremely significant, a fact that's noticeable because the site lists the two scores side by side.
Anyone on the internet can contribute — not just those who actually saw the film. Even if Rotten Tomatoes required people to pass a quiz on the movie before they rated it, the score would still be somewhat unreliable. But audience scores tend to not account for those who would never buy a ticket to the movie in the first place. And most critics feel that Rotten Tomatoes, in particular, oversimplifies criticism, to the detriment of critics, the audience, and the movies themselves.
In some cases, a film really is almost universally considered to be excellent, or to be a complete catastrophe. But critics usually come away from a movie with a mixed view.
The actors are great, but the screenplay is lacking. The filmmaking is subpar, but the story is imaginative. Some critics use a four- or five-star rating, sometimes with half-stars included, to help quantify mixed opinions as mostly negative or mostly positive.
The important point here is that no critic who takes their job seriously is going to have a simple yes-or-no system for most movies.
Critics watch a film, think about it, and write a review that doesn't just judge the movie but analyzes, contextualizes, and ruminates over it. The fear among many critics including myself is that people who rely largely on Rotten Tomatoes aren't interested in the nuances of a film, and aren't particularly interested in reading criticism, either. We worry that audience members who have different reactions will feel as if their opinion is somehow wrong, rather than seeing the diversity of opinions as an invitation to read and understand how and why people react to art differently.
Plenty of movies — from Psycho to Fight Club to Alien — would have earned a rotten rating from Rotten Tomatoes upon their original release, only to be reconsidered and deemed classics years later as tastes, preferences, and ideas about films changed. Sometimes being an outlier can just mean you're forward-thinking.
Voris, the Rotten Tomatoes vice president, told me that the site is always trying to grapple with this quandary. Critics love movies and want them to be good, and we try to be honest when we see one that we don't measures up. That doesn't mean the audience can't like a movie with a rotten rating, or hate a movie with a fresh rating.
It's no insult to critics when audience opinion diverges. In fact, it makes talking and thinking about movies more interesting.
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