How Rotten Tomatoes Actually Works
Rotten Tomatoes is that one website platform that both movies and series fans (me included) use to check out reviews and scores of how good or bad they are. In the case of movies, they are as, Fresh, Certified Fresh or Rotten, but I’ll mention that a bit later.
In a world of limited time, we tend to look for quick guidance on what movies or series to watch, and this is where Rotten Tomatoes comes in to help us make such choices. So how did Rotten Tomatoes come to be, how does its aggregator, the Tomatometer actually work and what do you need to consider when looking at the score of a movie?
Here, I’ll break this down this article into 3 comprehensible sections for you to understand.
Back in 1998, a movie fan named Senh Duong created Rotten Tomatoes, whose main intention at the time was to consolidate reviews of Jackie Chan movies. This later grew to be a platform for reviews of other movies.
This site was later sold to IGN in 2004, Flixster in 2010, Warner Bros in 2011 then Fandango bought Flixster (which was the parent company to Rotten Tomatoes) in 2016.
The first thing you need to know is that, the Rotten Tomatoes website doesn’t directly determine the movies score but it’s rather an aggregate website, meaning that movie critics submit their reviews then some math wizardry happens to come up with the film’s score.
So, in the beginning of this article, I mentioned that Rotten Tomatoes categorizes movies into Fresh, Certified Fresh or Rotten.
So what determines a movie to have either of these groups? Well for a movie to be:
I. Fresh: the movie has +60% positive reviews
II. Certified Fresh: the movie has been reviewed by Rotten Tomatoes approved 40 movie critics, including the top 5 critics, and maintains a score of +70%
III. Rotten: the movie has -59% less positive reviews
But how this scores are calculated is more complicated than you’d expect as you shall see with the case studies below:
Case Study 1
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Jordan Peele’s Get Out were both Certified Fresh. Dunkirk got a score of 93% while Get Out got 99%. So with that, you’d obviously think, at first sight, that Get Out was rated higher by critics than Dunkirk, but that’s not the case.
If you look closely at the Tomatometer section of the website, there’s the average rating value of the movie, which most of us completely ignore. In the case of the two films, Get Out has an average rating of 8.3/10 while Dunkirk has a value of 8.6/10.
So why is there a difference between the average rating and the final score of the two films? This variance of data between the average review and the final score is as a result of consensus among critics.
In the case of Dunkirk, it had a lower score because there was low consensus among critics. With that slightly complicated issue with Rotten Tomato score, it shows that it’s not that direct to decipher a film’s quality just by looking at the Certified Fresh Tomatometer logo that movie companies use to market their movies.
Case Study 2
Here, DC’s Man of Steel got a Rotten Score of 55% and Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk got a Fresh Score of 67% (higher than Thor: The Dark World’s 66%). At first glance you’d think that Man of Steel has a generally low rating than The Incredible Hulk, but it doesn’t.
Still looking at the average score, Man of Steel has an average rating of 6.2/10, which is similar to The Incredible Hulk’s 6.2/10.
Case Study 3
Now, there’s one more score that depicts divides between movie critics and fans, the Audience Score. This score, according to Rotten Tomatoes, portrayed by a popcorn bucket, is the percentage of all Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster users who have rated the movie positively.
If the movie has +3.5/5 stars, it’s gotten a positive rating and the movie is portrayed by a full popcorn bucket.
If the movie receives less than 3.5 stars, it’s gotten a negative rating and the movie is portrayed by a tipped over popcorn bucket.
Although there are cases where critics and the audience score are in line, for example last year’s dreadful movie The Mummy, there are cases where the divide takes full force.
This can be seen in the review of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice which got a score of 27% Rotten and the Audience Score of 3.6/5 that translates to 66%. At that time, DC fans petitioned the shutting down of the site.
Just recently, some DC Fans plotted to give Marvel’s Black Panther a low audience score, after the DCEUs set of bleak reviews (except Wonder Woman) on Rotten Tomatoes.
Another film was last year’s heavily polarized Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It got a Certified Fresh 91% score and an Audience Score of 3/5 which translates to 48%.
Well, with all these blizzard of facts and figures about the Average Score, Audience Score and Tomatometer, we realize that it’s pretty complicated. But what we can see from the previously mentioned case studies is that these Tomatometer scores can give false and wrongly skewed impressions of films.
This can be problematic, especially when a movie gets reviews that gets a mixed but positive or negative review. What this means is if the movie critic, for example, gives a movie a 3/5 score to show it was just okay, it goes into the Tomatometer as fresh. If we look at the overall score and see the movie’s score is, let’s say 80% Fresh, we might think that it’s an awesome movie. Or we might think that all critics were positively awed by that movie, but it doesn’t work like that.
I think we should pay more attention on the average score, because this gives a clearer picture of the movie’s rating, rather than the Tomatometer’s ambiguous score. So instead of just looking at the score, it’s also good to dig a little deeper by looking through what the critics are saying. This, to some extent, shows the critics’ thought process of coming up with that particular review.
As for the Audience Score, it shows that what movie critics say shouldn’t be the absolute guide to whether a movie is good or bad. Some of the most interesting movies are also the most divisive, if you look at movies like Star Wars: The Last Jedi or Man of Steel.
Or Netflix’s Bright:
So my advice would be, not to cling on Rotten Tomatoes for movie consensus entirely. Rotten Tomatoes should be used simply as a guide, a means to an end. You can also look at other review sites of your liking if Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t work for you (IGN, Metacritic just to mention a few)and follow the movie critics you trust.
And last but not least, make up your own mind, watch the movie with an open mind and judge it yourself.
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Cheers!!
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