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What does a Rotten Tomatoes score really mean?Ī Rotten Tomatoes score represents the percentage of critics who felt mildly to wildly positively about a given film. To earn the coveted “designated fresh” seal, a film needs at least 40 reviews, 75 percent of which are fresh, and five of which are from “top” critics.
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Scores of over 60 percent are considered fresh, and scores of 59 percent and under are rotten. And critics who don't agree with the site’s designation can request that it be changed.Īs 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. 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. Some critics (or staffers at their publications) upload their own reviews, choose their own pull quotes, and designate their review as “fresh” or “rotten.” Other critics (including myself) have their reviews uploaded, pull-quoted, and tagged as fresh or rotten by the Rotten Tomatoes staff. The site also deems a subset of critics to be “top critics” and calculates a separate score that only includes them.
#The space in between rotten tomatoes movie#
The scores don’t include just anyone who calls themselves a critic or has a movie blog Rotten Tomatoes only aggregates critics who have been regularly publishing movie reviews with a reasonably widely read outlet for at least two years, and those critics must be “active,” meaning they've published at least one review in the last year.
#The space in between rotten tomatoes series#
the “Approved Tomatometer Critics” who have met a series of criteria set by Rotten Tomatoes - are included in the site’s scores, though not every critic reviews every film, so any given score is more typically derived from a few hundred critics, or even less. The opinions of about 3,000 critics - a.k.a. “Our goal is to serve fans by giving them useful tools and one-stop access to critic reviews, user ratings, and entertainment news to help with their entertainment viewing decisions,” Jeff Voris, a vice president at Rotten Tomatoes, told me in an email.
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The idea is to quickly offer moviegoers a sense of critical consensus.
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The score that Rotten Tomatoes assigns to a film corresponds to the percentage of critics who’ve judged the film to be “fresh,” meaning their opinion of it is more positive than negative. How is a Rotten Tomatoes score calculated? Here are seven questions that many people have about Rotten Tomatoes, and review aggregation more generally - and some facts to clear up the confusion. So when I got curious about how people perceive Rotten Tomatoes and its effect on ticket sales, I did what any self-respecting film critic does: I informally polled my Twitter followers to see what they wanted to know. But for the casual moviegoer, how review aggregators work, what they measure, and how they affect ticket sales can be mysterious. So I, along with many other critics, think often of the upsides and pitfalls of aggregating critical opinion and its effect on which movies people see. My own work is included in both Rotten Tomatoes’ score and that of its more exclusive cousin, Metacritic.
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It’s not a simple cause-and-effect situation. And as most movie critics (including myself) will tell you, the correlation between Rotten Tomatoes scores, critical opinion, marketing tactics, and actual box office returns is complicated. It’s easy to see why anyone might assume that Rotten Tomatoes scores became more tightly linked to ticket sales, with potential audiences more likely to buy tickets for a movie with a higher score, and by extension, giving critics more power over the purchase of a ticket.īut that’s not the whole story. Since then, studio execs have started to feel as if Rotten Tomatoes matters more than it used to - and in some cases, they’ve rejiggered their marketing strategies accordingly. People had been using Rotten Tomatoes to find movie reviews since it launched in 2000, but after Fandango acquired the site, it began posting “Tomatometer” scores next to movie ticket listings. That’s when Rotten Tomatoes (along with its parent company Flixster) was acquired by Fandango, the website that sells advance movie tickets for many major cinema chains.
#The space in between rotten tomatoes tv#
In February 2016, Rotten Tomatoes - the site that aggregates movie and TV critics’ opinions and tabulates a score that’s “fresh” or “rotten” - took on an elevated level of importance.
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