We Need to Have a Talk About Rotten Tomatoes
Ok, so within the last 3-4 years, Rotten Tomatoes, the movie rate/review site, has been getting a lot of publicity. So much so that Movies will now use their tomatometer score on advertising. But here’s the thing, folks. The scores are so fucking poorly organized. I’ll go over it with you to give you a better understanding.
There are only two ratings, fresh or rotten. So a movie that has 98% on the tomatometer means 98% of the people rating it voted fresh. But here’s the problem. Let’s say, just to make it easy, 100 people voted. that means 98 people said it basically wasn’t bad. It was decent to outstanding. But to varying degrees. They have no way of telling the site what percentage of fresh they give it. It’s just one way or the other. There’s no grey area. So you could have a movie with an 86 percent fresh rating, but 75 percent of the people who rated it fresh, only kinda liked it. Basically it was fine, but could’ve been way better.
On the opposite note, a movie could be super rotten, like 32%, and that would mean that people didn’t care for it, for the most part. But their range isn’t there. So half the people voting rotten could have only just disliked it, while another half could hate it, but both of those sides are judged as the same amount of dislike for the movie.
So yeah, next time you tell me “oh man I can’t wait to see this movie, it got 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes!” I’m gonna tell you to shut the hell up and leave me alone cause those reviews are so dumb. If you take the tomatometer number absolutely seriously about every film you see, you’re gonna miss out on a lot of good stuff, and wind up seeing a ton of bad stuff.
Rant over.
