In Defense of Rotten Tomatoes
Credit: Getty
Shakespeare was credited for saying, “All the world’s a stage”. If that is true, it also means all the world’s a critic. And when we get bored with critiquing performance, we go to critiquing the critic, or the people that compile all the critics into one easy website, Rotten Tomatoes.
It takes a special level of criticism to critique one of the most important websites we have ever had, but here we are approaching the 3rd decade of the 21st century, listening to the following views of Rotten Tomatoes, the world’s most famous review website:
“Rotten Tomatoes score is irrelevant.“
“They are not attuned to their audience.“
These are actual opinions held by movie commentators in 2019.
I never thought I would need to put the power of the pen at work to write the following column, but its time to man the barricades and save Rotten Tomatoes!!!
(Okay, I’m sure Rotten Tomatoes is fine and isn’t going anywhere, but damnit there are dozens of thought influencers trying to besmirch Rotten Tomatoes, and I cannot let that stand! My soap boxes have arrived from Amazon: to arms!! To arms!!)
When Rotten Tomatoes was founded in 1998, it was a game changer and had near 100% Fresh meter from its users. It accomplished two things:
It compiled reviews nationwide for movies coming out. No longer did you have to rely on your local newspaper columnist to authoritatively declare a movie good or not (a newspaper for those younger than 35 was basically your Twitter or Facebook feed printed on a pamphlet of paper that was mailed to you daily. I know, we had no idea what we were doing). You also didn’t have to wait for Roger Ebert on TV to declare whether a movie was good. It began a 20 year trend of aggregating opinions to formulate your views instead of relying on a handful of people.
The brilliant idea of attributing a single score for each movie to represent the opinions of hundreds of critics. First, it made digesting hundreds of reviews really fast and easy. Secondly, we now had a benchmark to evaluate movies against each other. We love sports because we can incessantly argue about which player is better using whichever numbers we want. Thanks to rotten tomatoes, we now had a way to definitively lord our movie tastes over our friends and claim moral superiority in our amateur film criticism. Thanks, Rotten Tomatoes!
Rotten Tomatoes had an impact not just for the audience but for the studios. Back in the old days, even if a movie were bad, no one would really know until the 2nd weekend, at the earliest. If the plot was interesting or if you had a star you liked in it, you saw it, period.
Now, Rotten Tomatoes is putting immense pressure on studios to create a good product.
If it generates a rotten tomato score lower than 30%? Forget about it; the movie is going to bomb (unless you are explicitly marketing to the customer base of Forever 21)
Studios now put out tentpole movies weekly. Streaming companies are joining in the fun, too. With the choice out there and the information available, before the movie comes out to make your viewing choice, studios HAVE to make a good movie (or at least try to).
And this is supposed to be a bad thing??
Would we be better off if we were in a country like China, and the government decided to suppress all movie reviews (and Lebron James making a statement saying of course, we shouldn’t ever have movie reviews!!). Okay, maybe we can decide on movies ourselves without any biases. But you can surely bet we will get more movies like this.
So now that my soaring oratory in support of Rotten Tomatoes has been heard, let’s address the critics’ specific complaints against Rotten Tomatoes:
Rotten Tomatoes scoring is too binary
Let’s take a page from the mediation handbook and acknowledge that blurbing a movie review doesn’t tell much about the reviewer’s thoughts. I would give a positive review to Ready Player One and Shawshank Redemption, but one movie is wildly better. Argument granted! But guess what? When deciding whether to spend $15 on a ticket and leave the comfort of your home to check out a movie, all you really need to know is whether it will be a pleasant experience. Movie-going is not that complicated!!! (OnScreen Chief Critic Ken Jones is now saying, “ACKSTUALLY, YOU NEED TO LOOK AT THE FOLLOWING 100 FACTORS WHEN GOING TO A MOVIE”, while I’m doing the Robert Downey Jr eye roll gif over and over. A peek behind the curtain of Box Office Preview Podcast!”)
Movies are art, and art should not be boiled down to a single number. Movies can be art and sports at the same time. Movies are too important to our culture not to have a benchmarking system to evaluate what movies are good, what is great, and what truly stinks (or what’s truly elite)
Marvel Studios broke the Rotten Tomato score system. Nearly all MCU movies have a rotten tomato score of 85% or higher, and most are totally undeserved due to the binary nature of Rotten Tomatoes (and some arguably shady connections to Disney. Tin hat required before reading). Most likely, critics give MCU movies positive reviews just because they are “sooooooooooooo funny,” and critics don’t want to take comic book movies seriously. That’s an argument I just made up in critique of rotten tomatoes, and damnit, I might have check-mated myself. Let’s move on.
No one reads movie reviews anymore, just the snippets rotten tomatoes provide. This complaint comes from every wannabe film critic who thinks their opinions are sooooooooo important, but let’s be real. Outside of Ken Jones, what critics really matter? 5? 10? Be happy that Rotten Tomatoes gave you free publicity and a few free links.
Is Rotten Tomatoes perfect?
Nope.
Is it simple?
Yep.
Is it great that we have a really simple way to quickly assess whether a movie is worth seeing in this age where we have approximately 11,435 new TV shows and movies weekly?
Absolutely.
(As a side note, don’t we wish we had a rotten tomatoes website that aggregated all the Facebook and Twitter comments to tell us whether people liked the post? Wouldn’t that revolutionize social media in a great way to spare us hours of wading through comments?)
So let’s thank rotten tomatoes for all the time and money they saved us, leaving the country with billions of extra dollars in our wallets due to sparing us a bad time at the movies. Or better yet, let’s leave them a fresh review.