Rotten Tomatoes

Everybody wants to know if a movie is good or bad before they go out and see it. Assuming they go out to a theater, they don’t want to waste the time and money if the product is terrible. Naturally, they might go to their friends. The problem with that is everyone has their own opinions. Not everyone is going to agree on the quality of the movie. They might check out what critics thought. You basically get the same result, except these people get paid to tell you what they think. With so many different opinions, how can someone know if a movie is considered a good movie that’s worth spending money on, generally speaking? That’s where websites like Rotten Tomatoes come into play. They can tell you if a movie is good or not, right?

Rotten Tomatoes is a review aggregate scoring website. For any given movie, the site collects data from critic reviews from numerous different websites and publications. Each review is determined to be either positive or negative by its writer. From there, the site assigns the movie a percentage of how many critics gave it a positive review. If the movie has a core of 60% or more, it is considered “fresh”. If the score is less than 60%, it is considered “rotten”. If a film has at least 80 reviews (40 for limited release movies) and a score of 75% or more, it is considered “Certified Fresh. In order for reviews to be accepted by the website, the writer has to be a certified member of a writing guild or association. In addition to critic reviews, the movie is given a percentage score based on audience reviews. The site’s name is inspired by the practice of audiences throwing rotten tomatoes at poor stage performances. There are a number of other sites that do the same thing, but Rotten Tomatoes is the most well-known one.

Overall, I feel like this site can be a useful tool for gauging the quality of a certain movie. If you look up movies that are widely considered to be great, you will see that they have high percentage scores. The same goes for bad movies with low scores. However, I think people tend to give too much credence to this site in determining a film’s quality. Literally all it does is collect data based on what a bunch of people thought. It itself is not a review publication. It does give a “critical consensus” for each movie, but that’s just a summarization of all the reviews it collected. Just because a movie has a 30% critical score doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it and think it’s good. This is why it’s a great thing that they include a score for both the critics and the audiences. You can decide which one you agree with the most.

There’s a pretty interesting trend that happens with both the critic and audience score. Certain types of movies tend to garner more positive critic reviews than audience reviews, and vice versa. You can clearly see which movies the “professionals” like more than “regular folks”. Most notably, critics often give more positive reviews to the more artsy kind of movies, while the audiences tend to favor a lot of the more mainstream and blockbuster movies. In all honesty, this isn’t that surprising. Most “regular people” don’t go to the movies to see some introspective and nuanced movie. They just want to be entertained. On the occasion they do see one of these artsy movies, they may find it boring or stupid. With the critics, they tend to see mainstream movies as cheap popcorn flicks that don’t do much to cultivate the artform that is filmmaking. This is why it’s good not to take either score too seriously.

Neither score is an actual indication of the movie’s quality. All it’s telling you is what a bunch of other people thought. While movies with very low scores are considered to be bad, clearly not everyone had the same opinion. Take the 2013 disaster that is Movie 43. This is a truly horrendous movie that never should have been allowed to waste the time of those who watched it, even if watching and reviewing it is their job. Yet, somehow, as of me writing this, the movie has a 5% critic score and a 24% audience score. That means 5% of the 88 critics and 24% of the over 25,000 website users saw it and liked it enough to give it a positive rating. While this does make me a little bit sad for humanity, it does show that every movie out there will have its fans, despite most people thinking it’s horrible.

In most cases, I tend to agree more with the critics score. I actually enjoy seeing more artsy and independent movies. A lot of them really show how filmmaking is an art that tells stories in different ways. However, I don’t agree with the critics all of the time. The 2017 psychological horror movie It Comes at Night currently has an 88% critic score and a 44% audience score. I agree with the audience on this one. I thought this movie was boring and just drags along for its entire runtime. A lot of the critics seem to give praise to the unsettling nature of the film. I wasn’t all that impressed with what it tried to do.

The main point I’m trying to get across is that Rotten Tomatoes shouldn’t be seen as the definitive answer for whether or not a movie is good. Rotten Tomatoes isn’t telling you if a movie is good or bad. It’s just showing what a collection of critics and audiences thought about the movie. I think it’s a natural outcome that people would look to this website as the authority on film quality. In recent years, certain movie trailers have started using Rotten Tomatoes scores as part of the selling points. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this, but I do feel like this gives the site way too much credit. 90% of critics may have said a movie was great, but how many critics were actually used for the rating? Of those critics, what did they actually say about the movie? All of them might have been generally positive, but they could’ve been 6/10, rather than 10/10. There are a number of movies with 100% ratings, but less than 10 reviews. A lot of these are older movies from the early 20th century, but it’s still something to consider.

Overall, I find Rotten Tomatoes to be a good tool when deciding to watch a movie. The site’s rating system is pretty solid and gives a good idea for which movies are good and which ones are bad. At the same time, your opinion may not reflect what the critics and audiences say about the movie. It’s good to dig a little deeper when looking at the review scores. You’re able to find links to the critical reviews of any given movie. Use the rating as a starting point, then see what was said. Of course, this only matters if you actually care what other people thought about a movie. I seldom check the Rotten Tomatoes score before I go see a movie. If I want to see a movie, I like to go in with minimal preconceived ideas about what to expect. If I see that the latest Marvel movie got terrible reviews, I would go in expecting it to be terrible, even though I might have enjoyed it otherwise. At the end of the day, you’re the only one who should decide whether or not you think a movie is good. Who cares if a bunch of critics thought it was bad? If you like it, that’s all that matters.