Rotten tomato how do you know

Rotten Tomatoes was launched in August with the goal of merging critical reviews into an easily-readable and understandable score that viewers could use to determine whether a movie was worth their time or not.

They, in front of IMDB , are one of the most trusted sources for accurate, critical ratings on all your favorite movies. But where exactly do all the critical scores come from? And what do they mean?

When you click on a movie on Rotten Tomatoes, the first thing you see are two independent scores. In regards to critical reviews, there are three categories that a film can fall under: rotten, fresh, and certified fresh. A positive review is usually marked by a score of 6 or more out of 10, but there is also room for interpretation as to what a positive score can be due to the wide variety of rating systems that critics use.

Ultimately, it falls to the curators of Rotten Tomatoes to clarify whether a review is positive or negative, and categorize it as such. As a side note, the overall percentage that you see at the top of the screen is the total amount of reviewers that scored the film positively. Got it? Rotten Tomatoes deems that all critics meet a set of eligibility guidelines that are meant to exemplify that this person or publication is influential and experienced enough to write well-articulated reviews.

They do this through an application-based system with some of the requirements being: you must have been writing reviews for at least two years that are being published through a non-self-published source, whether that be online or print. The score is the percentage of users who have rated the movie or show positively. There is also a section for Verified Ratings which includes those that have actually bought tickets.

The most interesting finds are the ones that have a green splat for critics, and a full bucket of popcorn from the audience. And while reviews are opinion to some extent, the site boasts something called Certified Fresh, which brings a little more objectivity to the critique. If it meets these requirements, it is automatically flagged for review. When the Rotten Tomatoes staff can determine the movie or show is unlikely to fall below these numbers, it achieves its Certified Fresh status.

Because the Rotten Tomatoes ratings system is so general, RT certified fresh consideration gives the site more objective credibility. So, what's the bottom line? With the movie theater business under constant assault from the rise of streaming services, audiences are less and less likely to venture out to the movies. If they do happen to make it outside the house, they'll likely be extra picky about how they spend their money.

Will they choose an "untested" wildcard movie or one that has general approval from fans and critics? The answer is self-evident. On its surface, the Rotten Tomatoes rating system and Tomatometer seem to be a legitimate resource for the discerning consumer.

However, there is also a legitimate concern for low-budget indie movies who already have the cards stacked against them in distribution.

Since they don't have the marketing budget of the Hollywood tentpoles, curious moviegoers have little else to go on besides the Tomatometer. In the second case, if the staff isn't sure whether to tag a review as fresh or rotten, they reach out to the critic for clarification. As the reviews of a given film accumulate, the Rotten Tomatoes score measures the percentage that are more positive than negative, and assigns an overall fresh or rotten rating to the movie.

Scores of over 60 percent are considered fresh, and scores of 59 percent and under are rotten. A Rotten Tomatoes score represents the percentage of critics who felt mildly to wildly positively about a given film.

When I give a movie a 2. Theoretically, a percent Rotten Tomatoes rating could be made up entirely of middling-to-positive reviews. What Rotten Tomatoes tries to gauge is critical consensus.

But there are always outliers, whether from contrarians who sometimes seem to figure out what people will say and then take the opposite opinion , or from those who seem to love every film.

And critics, like everyone, have various life experiences, aesthetic preferences, and points of view that lead them to have differing opinions on movies. Rotten Tomatoes also lets audiences rate movies, and the score is often out of step with the critical score.

Sometimes, the difference is extremely significant, a fact that's noticeable because the site lists the two scores side by side. Anyone on the internet can contribute — not just those who actually saw the film.

Even if Rotten Tomatoes required people to pass a quiz on the movie before they rated it, the score would still be somewhat unreliable. But audience scores tend to not account for those who would never buy a ticket to the movie in the first place. And most critics feel that Rotten Tomatoes, in particular, oversimplifies criticism, to the detriment of critics, the audience, and the movies themselves.

In some cases, a film really is almost universally considered to be excellent, or to be a complete catastrophe. But critics usually come away from a movie with a mixed view. The actors are great, but the screenplay is lacking. The filmmaking is subpar, but the story is imaginative. Some critics use a four- or five-star rating, sometimes with half-stars included, to help quantify mixed opinions as mostly negative or mostly positive.

The important point here is that no critic who takes their job seriously is going to have a simple yes-or-no system for most movies. Critics watch a film, think about it, and write a review that doesn't just judge the movie but analyzes, contextualizes, and ruminates over it. The fear among many critics including myself is that people who rely largely on Rotten Tomatoes aren't interested in the nuances of a film, and aren't particularly interested in reading criticism, either.

We worry that audience members who have different reactions will feel as if their opinion is somehow wrong, rather than seeing the diversity of opinions as an invitation to read and understand how and why people react to art differently. Plenty of movies — from Psycho to Fight Club to Alien — would have earned a rotten rating from Rotten Tomatoes upon their original release, only to be reconsidered and deemed classics years later as tastes, preferences, and ideas about films changed.

Sometimes being an outlier can just mean you're forward-thinking. Voris, the Rotten Tomatoes vice president, told me that the site is always trying to grapple with this quandary. Critics love movies and want them to be good, and we try to be honest when we see one that we don't measures up.

The history of Rotten Tomatoes, like so many Bay Area legacies, began in the tech boom of the late s. As a contrast to most film advertising at the time, the site would feature both positive and negative reviews instead of just glowing quotes. Like most fledgling sites at the time, at first it was only clocking around a hundred hits a day. Current editor-in-chief Joel Meares happened to be one of those first few hundred visitors.

But it quickly picked up steam. A positive mention from Roger Ebert gave it a sense of credibility in the film community.