What's rotten with Rotten Tomatoes?

15:29What’s rotten with Rotten Tomatoes?

Over the years, Rotten Tomatoes has made itself one of the most important film sites for both moviegoers and industry professionals alike.

The site aggregates film reviews on any given movie, and deems it "certified fresh" if it has a 70% or more approval rating overall. For many audience members, a Rotten Tomatoes score is the deciding factor in whether or not a movie is worth seeing in theatres — or at all.

But according to a meticulously reported piece in Vulture, there's a flawed system at play behind the popular website — and it's just one of the latest examples of the problematic nature of film criticism right now.

Elamin Abdelmahmoud speaks with film critic Rad Simonpillai and journalist Lane Brown about just how skewed the rankings on Rotten Tomatoes can really be.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Lane, at one point in your piece, you write that the math just stinks at Rotten Tomatoes. Break it down for us. How does this magic formula work?

Lane: Not very complicated. So basically, every review on the site is classified as either "rotten" or "fresh" — good or bad, positive or negative. And then a Rotten Tomatoes score for a movie is calculated by just basically dividing the number of positive reviews by the total reviews. That's it. There is absolutely no attempt to gauge the enthusiasm of a review, and so if a movie is really positive or only a little positive, it counts all the same; it just counts as "fresh."

And so what you have are these really mediocre movies that get passing grades from a bunch of critics, and they can score 100 per cent. Whereas, if you have something that's a little bit more divisive — which is kind of what happens with a lot of great movies — you'll have a really passionate 90 per cent and maybe 10 per cent of critics will hate it, and it'll actually end up scoring lower than some mediocre movie that just a bunch of critics felt like they could say, "Yeah, it's fine."

Elamin: In a way it's basically trying to say that the same two people can have a college degree, and one of them could have an incredibly high average and the other one have a very low average — but they both pass, and you go like, "Oh, these people are basically exactly the same," even though they're not.

Rad: I think when Lane speaks toward a more challenging movie — say, something like Inherent Vice, which I think it's a brilliant movie. But that initially scored, like, 60 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes because people were struggling to grapple with it. So this system, all it does is reward mediocrity because if you create a safe product that … people think is fine, that gets a 100 per cent score.

Elamin: Lane, can you think of a particularly powerful example of a movie that did really well on the Tomatometer, but that's just because of the way that the ranking system is set up? 

Lane: Oh, boy. A lot. I mean, I'm going to lose some friends here, but Paddington 2 is up there with Citizen Kane…. It's as good as Raging Bull, according to the Tomatometer.

Elamin: Why is Paddington 2 catching strays today?

Rad: I know!

Lane: Well, it's a … yeah, no comment.

Rad: Can I add, we have A Haunting in Venice opening on Friday, and if you look at the Rotten Tomatoes score as of yesterday, it was 85 per cent — pretty high. But then if you read the individual reviews, it's like, "Oh, it's mediocrity, but it has some nice scenes." All the review blurbs are just people finding excuses to give it a pass.

Elamin: Let's talk about your work as a critic, because as we mentioned, you're a Tomatometer-approved critic. But in terms of how your work shows up on Rotten Tomatoes: you write your piece for a website, and then how does that end up translating into the Tomatometer?

Rad: So I write my piece for, let's say, The Globe and Mail…. Rotten Tomatoes automatically picks up the review, and then they give it a score based on my writing. That's already the big issue…. I'm not here to tell you whether you should go see this movie or not. I'm just trying to help you understand it. I am giving you my opinions. But Rotten Tomatoes will then take that review and say that this is either a positive or a negative review, when sometimes that is not really the purpose of my review. That's kind of the original sin of Rotten Tomatoes.

Lane: Yeah, there's a lot of things that a movie review can do that's not necessarily telling you to go see it or don't go see it.

Rad: Yeah, and everything they're doing is detrimental to my career…. This all started with Siskel and Ebert — the whole thumbs-up-thumbs-down system is what kind of ruined film criticism, where it's no longer a conversation to unpack ideas; it's just, "Let me tell you 'yay' or 'nay.'" And when they're trying to reduce our reviews to just the score, they're making us expendable. We're replaceable. It's detrimental to our career. It's just feeding a system that is furthering the idea that we're making people not have to read reviews anymore. So what do I need to be in this for anymore?

Elamin: You're irreplaceable to me, pal.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jess Low.