Something is rotten in the state of Tomatoes’ reviews

It’s become a common practice over the past 25 years for moviegoers to use the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes to help decide on what they should spend the increasingly high price of a cinema ticket.

Likewise, critics in countries where films arrive later than their US or European release dates will often glance at a film’s Rotten Tomatoes score to see whether they should give what precious time they have to a screening of a film they have limited space to promote.

Publicists in the film business religiously visit the site to see whether their films have received the coveted “fresh” certification that’s become more and more vital to the chances of a successful opening weekend for a film or a streaming debut for a television show. Emails sent by publicists to critics often include new titles’ Rotten Tomatoes ratings as a push for reviews or mentions in publications.

However, as a recent report by Vulture reveals, what seems like mathematically sound and neutral aggregator is  “erratic, reductive, and easily hacked”. Hollywood, which has often decried the site’s influence, is firmly in its grip and doing what it can to game the system by whatever means necessary. There are also questions of conflict of interest due to the site being owned by US online ticketing company Fandango, in turn owned by Universal Pictures. This could mean that films produced by Universal may be more likely to be certified fresh than rotten, even if the site maintains that its neutrality is protected.

Unlike the ratings system used by the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), which is owned by Amazon, Rotten Tomatoes uses two meters — one that aggregates reviews by critics and one that aggregates user-generated reviews — for a “critics’ score” and an “audience score”. IMDB uses only ratings submitted by users. Rotten Tomatoes was founded in 1998 by a group of University of California Berkeley graduates and since then sold to various companies in the entertainment industry. Both its influence and interference into its ratings system have grown in that time.

The first problem for numerous observers was that the conditions for a film to be rated fresh rather than rotten are loosely defined — a film needs only to receive 60% or above to move it from rotten to fresh. Many reviews might best be described as lukewarm or “on the fence,” but are given the same weight as glowing appraisals. Seven out of 10 moviegoers in the US use the site as means of deciding what to watch, but most of these also just look at the overall score of a film, without necessarily reading the content of the reviews that contribute to its score.

The second problem is that the use of two meters has allowed rabid online fan bases to either manipulate the audience score of a film in reaction to a critical dismissal — common in the case of comic book adaptations and fantasy series — or troll a film that has critical commendations to drastically reduce its audience score — as sexist or racist online trolls have done with films they hate.

Such uses and abuses have led many filmmakers to decry the site and its system. Martin Scorsese has said that Rotten Tomatoes reduces directors to content manufacturers and viewers to “unadventurous consumers”, while Paul Schrader told Vulture that the site’s “system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don’t go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do.”

Studios do this because of the site’s power to make or break a film’s opening weekend — in 2017 prospective blockbusters such as Baywatch and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales received rotten ratings, which studios blamed for their failure at the box office. Companies doing public relations for films were revealed to have offered critics payment for positive reviews to boost their Tomatometer ratings and ensure better distribution deals. Though this is certainly an ethical violation of the supposedly objective spirit of the site, it may be for nothing as recent research into whether Tomatometer scores definitively result in financial success for films has been inconclusive, with some reports claiming no correlation and others that there is.

The usefulness of Rotten Tomatoes ultimately relies on users doing more than just checking overall scores and reading the reviews, but the site’s use of its overall Tomatometer rating means that it sabotages its own best intentions of providing all the reviews you may need to make up your mind in one easily accessible place. The only real solution to the problems for the site, its users and the industry seems to be simply to read the reviews, but in an overstuffed, attention-addled digital world that may look more and more like a boomer pipe dream.

If you’re using Rotten Tomatoes to decide what to watch, then really all you’re doing is basing your decision on a system that reduces the hard work of individual critics to a meaningless “certified fresh” slogan that means very little in terms of “good” or “bad” and tells you nothing useful.