Rotten Tomatoes 25th Anniversary

[Benoit Blanc]

Discuss the site whether ya love it, hate it, or are indifferent.

[Mikezilla3k]

Should get shut down at this point ICL.

[The Debts]

It has always been a guide, never a bible. Granted, I did adhere to it more when I was growing up but later on I was able to achieve a balance of finding it useful but never the end all be all.

[drb999]

People use it to attack or defend movies and it’s all very tedious now. It’s used more as a weapon than it does as a guide. It’s especially bad on social media cough Twitter cough.

[Jay H.]

It serves its purpose for me.

[Moviefan2k4]

I like that both critics and regular audiences are polled for it, so there's some kind of balance between the two.

[Region_unlocked]

Rotten Tomatoes seems to generally be a good gauge for the general feelings around newer movies. The emphasis that's put on it as the arbiter of quality is annoying, bit it is what it is. As time's gone by though I think there's a bit of a long term flaw in this method of determining consensus. That being that, for the most part, tomatometer scores are snapshots of how any given film was judged in it's time. That score can tend to discourage reevaluation of films that may have been before their time. Or, conversely, give undue credit to a film that may have aged particularly poorly. It'd be nice if you could filter the reviews of a film to only show ones written within the last 5 years or so, rather than the current soup of new and old reviews. Just so you can see if perspectives have changed in the time since it was released. The inherent issue is not every films is being regularly reevaluated in print, so it might not even be possible to offer such a filter sometimes, so it's absence it understandable. It'd be a neat option when possible though.

[Claudio Del Barrio]

IMDB 4 Life!

[Mephariel]

RT serves its purpose for me. I go to it often.

[Trekkie313]

Too many unverified "critics" who are really nobodies with a blog that's never updated affecting scores of major movies cause they need to be contrarian.

[Prog5000]

It works for me.

[wonderer99]

For those who know hiw it works it can be very useful. For many though they decide a movies worth on the score which is not only detrimental to them but to the movies as well.

[Boccaccio]

I never use Rotten Tomatoes.

IMDB, Metacritic and this site is all I need.

[Zivouhr]

Originally Posted by Trekkie313

Too many unverified "critics" who are really nobodies with a blog that's never updated affecting scores of major movies cause they need to be contrarian.

I was wondering how a person becomes qualified as a professional critic on there, good point.

[Ruined]

The site is basically useless for its scores, but is useful to get quick links to a bunch of critic reviews.

The scoring itself though I disregard because it is not credible - they will do anything to make big studios look good, including manipulating the scoring

[BluRayTim]

Garbage, as is Metacritic. They seriously obscure audience and critic ratings and reviews to make entertainers and forms of entertainment less or more disliked or liked than they really are.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is hit and miss. But lately, the IMDb is much more of miss.

Lately, a bunch of, um, unique people jack up ratings of much of the most failed, obscure, unreputable and worst garbage imaginable. This is to make such trash seem like it’s far more acclaimed than it really is.

Like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic right from the start, the IMDb lately has way too much faith is the most failed, obscure, unreputable and worst critics imaginable. And way too little faith in the good, known, reputable and successful critics.

[Bugg]

Originally Posted by Trekkie313

Too many unverified "critics" who are really nobodies with a blog that's never updated affecting scores of major movies cause they need to be contrarian.

You can see where they started loosening the standards as to what and how many critics should be included.



More half ass bloggers and geek culture media outlets are added to the mix, to ensure a higher % of studio dross gets that all important Certified Fresh logo.

[Region_unlocked]

Originally Posted by Bugg

[Show spoiler]You can see where they started loosening the standards as to what and how many critics should be included.

More half ass bloggers and geek culture media outlets are added to the mix, to ensure a higher % of studio dross gets that all important Certified Fresh logo.

I don't really see an issue with this. Rotten Tomatoes' verification standards do at least weed out fair-weather hobbyists. At bare minimum you have to have a consistent output of reviews for 2 years, a degree of professionalism and a commitment to journalistic ethics. Basically being a critic has to be your job. That's the only threshold that needs to be reached really. That was essentially the only threshold that ever existed in the old days too, the profession has just been democratized and decoupled from newspapers due to the internet. I'm not sure what there is to be gained by strictly gatekeeping input on the tomatometer to print and broadcast media, especially given how those distribution methods are rapidly dying. Seriously, I can't remember the last time I saw a film review on broadcast television.

[Benoit Blanc]

The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes
The most overrated metric in movies is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked — and yet has Hollywood in its grip.

In 2018, a movie-publicity company called Bunker 15 took on a new project: Ophelia, a feminist retelling of Hamlet starring Daisy Ridley. Critics who had seen early screenings had published 13 reviews, seven of them negative, which translated to a score of 46 percent on the all-important aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes — a disappointing outcome for a film with prestige aspirations and no domestic distributor.

But just because the “Tomatometer” says a title is “rotten” — scoring below 60 percent — it doesn’t need to stay that way. Bunker 15 went to work. While most film-PR companies aim to get the attention of critics from top publications, Bunker 15 takes a more bottom-up approach, recruiting obscure, often self-published critics who are nevertheless part of the pool tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. In another break from standard practice, several critics say, Bunker 15 pays them $50 or more for each review. (These payments are not typically disclosed, and Rotten Tomatoes says it prohibits “reviewing based on a financial incentive.”)

[stvn1974]

Happy 25th, where is the reboot?