Let’s say you want to go watch the new movie that just came out this past weekend. You don’t know much about it other than its name. You need to do more research to figure out whether it’d a good movie or not and whether it’s worth spending your hard-earned money to watch. You browse the internet and you come up upon Rotten Tomatoes.
33%.
Based on that rather low rating, you decide not to go to the movie. But let’s say your friends go because they didn’t look at the Rotten Tomatoes rating prior. They come back and say they really enjoyed the movie. “What’s the deal with that?” you think to yourself in your head.
Well, let me explain that “deal” to you with this post on why Rotten Tomatoes is not always the best way to make decisions with movies.
If you don’t know how Rotten Tomatoes works, it simply takes a rather random set of critic reviews and compiles them with a “secret” algorithm to give a movie rating out of 100. This rating system is known as the “Tomatometer”.
The issue with the “Tomatometer” is that not everyone knows how exactly to use it, which leads to some big issues. Many people believe the rating provided is in direct correlation to the amount of happiness and enjoyment out of they can pull out of the movie. However, that’s not always true.
The best examples of this are movies like Baywatch and the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie. These movies got ratings of 30 and 19 percent respectively on the “Tomatometer” after compiling numerous critic reviews. You’d imagine the movies were pretty bad after seeing these numbers, yet ratings by a vast amount of Google users provided by Google averaged at a high 89 and 91 percent respectively. How did people enjoy the movie if the rating was so bad?
The “Tomatometer” doesn’t report how much an average moviegoer would enjoy the movie, but rather it reports special critic reviews that are rather uniquely opinionated. Movies like Baywatch and the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean aren’t made necessarily to match the concepts of the perfect movie. Baywatch was an R-rated comedy and Pirates 5 was a family adventure. These movies are not made for critics but rather general audiences, and that’s why people enjoy them despite the ratings.
The other issue that comes from Rotten Tomatoes is the impact its wild ratings have on movies. Since people began to trust the rating so much in recent times, a percent on the “Tomatometer” almost always directly matched a large amount of revenue for a certain movie (and the same trend for low rated movies). Therefore, there are many movies out there that are truly creating a wonderful experience for the general audience but don’t get the profit they need and deserve because of that low critic-based rating. This ultimately leads to less and less high-quality films being produced because creators fear a lack of profit despite the emotional value of the film.
So just a few tips for the next time you want to go out for a movie but need to do research on it.
- Only go to Rotten Tomatoes if you know how to use it! Use it in sync with other rating systems to get a holistic viewpoint
- Ask anyone that has already seen it whether they enjoyed it. Direct experience is better than what you find online most of the time.
- You never know how a movie would make you feel until you actually experience it yourself!
1. With big name movies such as The Joker coming out recently, many people are thinking about reviews and quality of films right now.
2. As someone who uses Rotten Tomatoes a lot, I was immediately interested in reading this blog. I have definitely vetoed movies before because of a bad score on the Tomatometer… In the future, I’ll be sure to check a few review sites before I actually decide if a movie is worth the time and money or not. The only thing I think you could have added would have been a paragraph aimed at teaching people who don’t use Rotten Tomatoes, since most of your blog was directed to those of us who do.
3. Your web formatting is great. I love the hook of your title and introduction, the stand alone “33%” is very striking, and your use of a bulleted list at the end makes sure that your main ideas are clearly defined. The only things missing are links (perhaps to the Rotten Tomatoes and Google reviews you cite) and images, although their absence did not bother me personally.