What’s Wrong With Rotten Tomatoes
And now for something completely different… an editorial about movie review site Rotten Tomatoes. With more and more self-appointed movie critics popping up online every day, it is increasingly difficult to know where to look for the most reliable and informative reviews. This has lead to the proliferation of review aggregator sites such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (and GameRankings for video games), which today are among the most popular sources for reviews on the net. Clearly people have a desire to see the general consensus among many different critics, no doubt under the assumption that greater wisdom can be gained through higher numbers. But how useful is the Tomato-meter, really? One of the biggest problems I find is that the rating percentage can be skewed when there are a lower number of reviews for a particular film (perhaps it is only a limited release, or hasn’t actually hit theatres yet). People look at the percentage and take it as a definitive score, but they don’t realize that the number is constantly in flux. A movie might be sitting at 70% a few days before it hits theatres, but then a couple days afterwards it has suddenly dropped to below 50% because more people have seen it and given it a thumbs down.
Also, different reviewers use different rating systems. Just because you can mathematically translate a 4 or 5 star scale to a percentage, doesn’t mean they necessarily equate to the same thing. Thirdly, how reliable are each of the critics in the RT database? While they all need to be accredited in some way to be used on the site, they vary wildly in terms of movie knowledge, experience, and genre bias. The fact that they all weigh equally on the final outcome seems a little silly. Rotten Tomatoes does give you the ability to pick your own favourite critics and just average their scores, which is a little more practical. However, I highly doubt many people use this feature (I know I don’t).
Lastly, the site reduces each individual review to nothing more than a number and a one-sentence blurb. While this is probably all most people want to read anyway, it can completely misrepresent a particular critic’s view. While you can click to read each review in full, realistically there’s no way anyone is going to read them all.
I often wonder how much of an influence a site like Rotten Tomatoes has on people when they write their own reviews as well. There’s certainly nothing wrong with critics reading the opinions of colleagues to contextualize their own writing, but I think it’s hard not to be swayed one way or another when you see a general consensus on a site like RT. It may not be a conscious thing, but I think Rotten Tomatoes can lead to a self-perpetuating cycle of reviews that become extremely one-sided.
I’m not saying Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t have its uses, but I definitely have a problem with people who live and die by the Tomato-meter. It’s a tool and nothing more, it is by no means an ultimate compendium of movie wisdom. Personally I prefer the Movie Review Query Engine, which catalogs reviews from a variety of sources but does not make any additional claims about overall opinions of the movie. What are your thoughts? Do you use Rotten Tomatoes on a regular basis, and why?
Comments (8)
Good observation.
I check Rotten Tomatoes just about every time I go see a movie. I always wondered how RT determines how a review lands on the tomato-meter. Sometimes it shows the fresh tomato icon, yet the one line summary trashes the movie. Typo, maybe?
Worse: respected critics are valued the same as lame-o nobodies: Roger Ebert is equal to the San Jose Mercury News? I think not. (SJ Mercury has the worst movie critic in the US – I know because I read the paper for 2 years). So now I just look at the “Cream of the Crop” on the right side of the page for the more prominent reviewers.
Earlier today I checked out “Inside Man.” I peeked at the high 89% rating which locked in my decision to purchase a $5 matinee ticket. However, I was disappointed after seeing that film today; it deserved a 60% rating at best. At least Ebert didn’t like it.
Then there are those movies that just don’t matter if they have a high rating or not, I’m gonna watch ‘em: Xmen and Pirates of the Caribbean, to name a few.
Either way it doesn’t matter. RT is an excellent place for a general consensus on a movie, one that you must take with a grain of salt.
The other site, MRQE, is just ugly – it doesn’t seem very user-friendly. There are no box-office charts, no upcoming movie listings, no veggies on the page, and it took FOREVER to query. Appears to be more like a boring homework assignment than a cool, hip movie website.
(I don’t even bother with RT’s video game reviews, they need to just drop that. Gamespot is monumentally better.)
Oh, and great site guys!
Posted by Leo on April 12th, 2006Hey Leo, thanks for the comments. Personally I liked Inside Man a lot, but again that 89% on Rotten Tomatoes is probably a bit misleading, since as you pointed out, there were some prominent critics who didn’t like it.
Same thing happened with Slither. It’s still sitting around 84% but I find it hard to believe that the average movie-goer will walk into that movie and really enjoy it. Again, I liked it a lot myself but RT is not foolproof.
As for MRQE, it does only one thing and it does it well. Sometimes it’s more about functionality than it is about how nice something looks. I still visit Rotten Tomatoes a lot though, probably for some of the other things you mentioned like upcoming movie listings, etc.
Posted by Sean on April 14th, 2006Rotten Tomatoes is HORRIBLY inaccurate and out of touch from what NORMAL, everyday Americans like to watch. The worse the movie, the more foul and septic, the better RT rates it.
Posted by Bo on December 21st, 2009An amazing study of how out of touch with everyday citizens the web can get.
Rotten tomato is the worst for me. The tomato meter is so useless and misleading. Their critics are definitely genre bias as you said.
Just like when they are reviewing comedies their critics looks for an intelligent plot, depth etc. Well comedies should be funny(period) with or without the deep plot. And if you laughed a lot on a movie then it’s good.
Posted by jeff on July 5th, 2010I wish that the critics could provide an understandable criticism without resorting to absurd metaphors and what they percieve to be witty lines. I want to know why the film is bad or good not “Often masterful in its distillation of exposition into pure sight and sound energy… but equally frustrating in its attention-grabbing lack of focus”. I know you shouldn’t focus on catering for the lowest common denominator but this sort of tripe reveals nothing.
Posted by philbah on April 20th, 2011I liked Rotten Tomatoes until recently, when the deodorant adverts featuring large breasted women appeared. I quite like large-breasted women…. but it’s not what I’m looking for when I visit a film review website. And my other half finds it degrading. Is this a film review or soft porn website? I won’t be visiting again until the adverts change. Enough rotten tomatoes.
Posted by Mark on July 16th, 2011One of the inconsistencies that I don’t understand about RT’s analytics is how, for example, two critics can give the same rating to a movie, but their icons are different.
For example, both Kyle Smith of the New York Post and Stephen Whitty of the Newark Star-Ledger gave “Miss Bala” 2.5 out of 4 stars, but Smith’s review received the “tomato” icon, while Whitty’s review received the “splat” icon.
Posted by CynicalCritic on January 29th, 2012Leave a Reply