I’ve written about a hundred films on this site, including a list of the ones Rotten Tomatoes got dead wrong. So this isn’t a complaint about a site disagreeing with me.
It’s about a number most people misread, that the site has never bothered to explain, and that studios have learned to manufacture. I think the Tomatometer has done more damage to how people choose films than any bad critic ever did, and it’s backwards that a percentage built for sorting reviews now steers what studios are willing to make.
What does the Tomatometer measure?
The proportion of critics who liked a film at all. Not how much they liked it.
The site sorts every review into one of two buckets: fresh or rotten. A rave and a mild thumbs-up count identically. The score is the percentage that landed in the fresh bucket, and nothing else survives the conversion. Work through what that does. A film where every critic says “perfectly fine, mildly enjoyable” scores 100%. A film where seven critics call it a masterpiece and three call it a disaster scores 70%. The consensus mediocrity beats the divisive great film, every time, by design.
That’s the whole trick, and once you see it the site becomes readable. A high Tomatometer means broad agreement that something isn’t bad. It doesn’t mean good, it’s never meant good, and the word “score” invites everybody to read it as though it does.
The site does publish an average rating alongside it, out of ten. Almost nobody looks at it, and it’s the number that would answer the question people are asking. I hate that the site tucks its most useful figure into small type and puts the least useful one inside a giant red tomato. That’s a design choice, and it’s the wrong one.
Watch: How Does the Tomatometer Work?, Rotten Tomatoes
Why do Rotten Tomatoes scores feel wrong so often?
A made-up movie with very real symptoms. A 94% means most critics thought it was fine. It isn't a 9.4.
Because binary conversion destroys the information you care about.
Take two films at 75%. One had three quarters of critics calling it excellent. The other had three quarters calling it watchable and a quarter calling it terrible. Same number, completely different films, and the Tomatometer can’t distinguish them.
Now take a film that provokes people. Half the critics find it extraordinary and half find it a failure. That’s the profile of a great deal of ambitious cinema. It scores 50% and reads as garbage.
This is why the films that get “wrongly” scored are so consistently the same kind.
Divisive, stylized, tonally odd, ahead of their audience. The metric punishes disagreement, and disagreement is what interesting films produce. The people who lose are the filmmakers who took a risk and the viewers who skip a strange, brilliant picture because a number told them it was half garbage.
Who decides which reviews count on Rotten Tomatoes?
Rotten Tomatoes does, and almost nobody scrutinizes that.
The company has to approve critics for inclusion, and it has to approve outlets as well. Somebody at the company decides whose opinion enters the calculation, using criteria the company controls and can change. Two consequences follow. The pool of critics is a chosen list, and it doesn’t represent anything neutral. And the composition of that list changes over time, so a score from 2005 and a score from 2025 came from different populations and can’t be compared.
A further wrinkle: for older films the sample is thin. A 1970s picture might have twenty reviews on file, many written retrospectively by people who already knew its reputation. That’s a small modern reappraisal wearing the same badge as a 300-review modern score, and calling it a contemporary critical consensus misleads everyone who reads it.
Has the Rotten Tomatoes score been manipulated?
There’s documented reporting that the machinery has been paid to help.
Fandango, a ticket seller, owns Rotten Tomatoes. The company reporting whether a film is good also profits when you buy a ticket to it. I think that conflict alone should make anybody skeptical, and it amazes me how rarely it comes up when people quote the score like a verdict.
Beyond that, journalists have reported on studios paying a public relations firm to solicit favorable reviews from smaller approved outlets, with the effect of moving scores upward for films that needed help. The reporting describes an arrangement where a modest number of positive reviews from minor critics can shift a score materially, because every review counts the same. It’s the binary problem again, seen from the other end. If a rave and a shrug are worth the same, buying shrugs is cheap and effective. I’m not claiming every score is bought, and there’s no evidence of that. What the reporting establishes is that the system is manipulable and has been manipulated. That’s enough to stop treating the number as a fact about a film.
Is the Rotten Tomatoes audience score reliable?
It’s a different set of problems and they’re worse in some ways.
Audience scores can be brigaded. Coordinated campaigns have driven films to very low audience numbers before release, sometimes before anybody could have seen them, for reasons entirely unrelated to the film. The site has changed its rules several times in response and the problem hasn’t gone away.
There’s also a self-selection issue that no rule fixes. People who rate films on a website aren’t a sample of the audience. They skew toward those with strong feelings, and strong feelings skew negative more readily than positive.
The gap between critic and audience scores gets discussed as though it shows critics are out of touch. Sometimes it does. Often it reveals that one number came from a chosen list of professionals and the other from whoever felt strongly enough to log in.
Why does the Rotten Tomatoes score matter?
Because the number moved from describing the market to steering it. A Tomatometer figure now appears on ticket sites, streaming interfaces, television listings and search results. It’s the first thing many people see about a film and often the only thing. Studios track it, market around it, and in some cases structure release decisions around it.
When a single flawed metric becomes the default signal, it stops reflecting quality and starts producing it. Studios make films that avoid the kind of disagreement that lowers a score. That selects for exactly the consensus mediocrity the metric already favors.
This is the main cost. Any single film being scored unfairly is a small injury. The big one is a binary count with a chosen sample and a commercial owner becoming the thing an industry optimizes for, and audiences pay for that with blander movies.
How has Rotten Tomatoes changed since it started?
Because a tool built to collect reviews in one place now sets the target an industry optimizes for. It started as a hobby project aggregating reviews so a reader could find them in one place. That’s a useful service and the percentage was a rough index for sorting. Nobody was making release decisions on it. Then it got bought, twice, and ended up owned by a company that sells tickets. Along the way the number stopped being an index and became the product. Everything else on the page, the average rating, the individual reviews, the critic names, is now decoration around one figure. That progression isn’t unique and you can watch the same thing happen elsewhere. A measurement gets adopted widely, the measurement becomes the target, and the target gets managed. The number stops describing reality and starts producing a version of it.
The same argument applies to Goodreads ratings, to review counts on retail listings, and to any place where a single figure has been made to carry more weight than it was built for. I’ve written about the books version of this at length.
What are the alternatives to Rotten Tomatoes?
Several, and each fixes a different part of the problem. Metacritic uses weighted numerical scores instead of a binary count, so a rave and a shrug aren’t equivalent. It’s a smaller critic pool and its own weighting decisions, but the arithmetic is closer to what people assume they’re reading.
Letterboxd is a user community instead of an aggregator of professionals, and the numbers skew toward the enthusiast. What it does well is lists and reviews written by people whose taste you can follow over time. That’s closer to how film recommendations worked before aggregation.
Individual critics remain the best option and the least used. Find three or four whose taste maps to yours, including at least one who disagrees with you usefully, and read them. It takes longer than a glance at a percentage and it works. My own ranked lists are on this site, and I’m not neutral about them. What I’d say for them is that they explain a verdict instead of reporting an average, and you can decide whether my reasoning matches your taste. That isn’t a decision a number lets you make.
How should you use Rotten Tomatoes?
As one input, read correctly. That takes about ten seconds longer than reading the big number.
Look at the average rating. It’s on the same page, it’s out of ten, and it tells you how much critics liked the film instead of how many tolerated it. Check the review count. Twenty reviews and three hundred reviews aren’t comparable, and old films almost always have the former. Treat a divisive score as interesting instead of bad. A film at 55% with passionate defenders is frequently more worth your evening than a film at 90% nobody remembers.
And read two actual reviews by people whose taste you’ve calibrated against your own. That’s worth more than any aggregate, and it’s exactly what the percentage was built to replace. I’d rather people ignored the Tomatometer entirely than keep letting a ticket seller’s binary count talk them out of films they’d have loved.
