Vox and the problem with Rotten Tomatoes
You’ve probably noticed that this past summer Rotten Tomatoes was in the (film) news a lot. Brett Ratner had beef with the film aggregator, so did Dwayne „The Rock“ Johnson and most recently Martin Scorsese, and the sentiment that the Academy Award winer expressed in his THR essay.
Weather you agree on the Rotten Tomatoes system, or the bad reviews that your favorite movie did get, Vox did an amazing job reminding us on „Why Rotten Tomatoes scores don’t mean what they seem“.
In a nutshell, the biggest problem RT has with film reviews is the average reviews. The ones that are right in the medium.
The reviews of films that are neither good nor bad. You see…. RT sees the films either as good or bad and nothing in-between, so a movie will receive Certified Fresh badge if there are more reviews leaning to either sides of the spectrum.
This is confusing not just for the film critics, but for everyone else involved. Rotten Tomatoes and the fans that are Google-in weather the movie they are about to see has a good „Fresh“ percentage on RT.
Check out the outstanding Vox video bellow.
