The Mummy gave Tom Cruise his biggest global opening ever. If there is a Rotten Tomatoes effect, it seems to only extend to the American market. Plenty of people would like you to believe that the weak link between box office earnings and critical opinion proves that critics are at fault for not liking the film, and that audiences are a better gauge of its quality.
Fans LOVE the movie. Huge positive scores. Baywatch ended up with a very comfortably rotten 19 percent Tomatometer score , compared to a just barely fresh 62 percent audience score. We are also a rather reserved and nerdy bunch, not regularly armed with venom and knives. But somehow, I suspect that younger ticket buyers — an all-important demographic — lacked nostalgia for year-old lifeguard TV show, and thus weren't so sure about seeing Baywatch in the first place.
Likewise, I doubt that a majority of Americans were ever going to be terribly interested in the fifth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise which notched a 30 percent Tomatometer score and a 64 percent audience score , especially when they could just watch some other movie. But with lackluster reviews, the average moviegoer just had no reason to give them a chance.
Big studio publicists, however, are paid to convince people to see their films, not to candidly discuss the quality of the films themselves. Consider, for example, the case of the aforementioned Emoji Movie.
I and most other critics hoped the movie would be good, as is the case with all movies see. It screened for press on Wednesday night at 5 pm, and then the review embargo lifted at 3 pm the next day — mere hours before the first public showtimes. Thus, in spite of there being no strong correlation between negative reviews and a low box office, its first-weekend box returns might be less susceptible to any potential harm as a result of bad press.
Such close timing can also backfire; critics liked this summer's Captain Underpants , for example, but the film was screened too late for the positive reviews to measurably boost its opening box office. That first-weekend number is important, because if a movie is the top performer at the box office or if it simply exceeds expectations, like Dunkirk and Wonder Woman did this summer , its success can function as good advertising for the film, which means its second weekend sales may also be stronger.
And that matters , particularly when it means a movie is outperforming its expectations, because it can actually shift the way industry executives think about what kinds of movies people want to watch. The implication was that Fox believed the movie would be a critical success, and indeed, it was — the movie has a 97 percent Tomatometer score and an 86 percent audience score.
In , Metacritic conducted a study of the correlation between its scores and second weekend sales , and found — not surprisingly — that well-reviewed movies dip much less in the second weekend than poorly reviewed movies.
This is particularly true of movies with a strong built-in fan base, like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice , which enjoyed inflated box office returns in the first weekend because fans came out to see it, but dropped sharply in its second weekend, at least partly due to extremely negative press.
Most critics who are serious about their work make a good-faith effort to approach each film they see with as few expectations as possible.
But it's hard to have much hope about a movie when it seems obvious that a studio is trying to play keep-away with it. And the more studios try to game the system by withholding their films from critics, the less critics are inclined to enter a screening devoid of expectations, however subconscious. If you ask critics what studios ought to do to minimize the potential impact of a low Rotten Tomatoes score, their answer is simple: Make better movies.
Hiding a film from critics might artificially inflate first-weekend box office returns, but plenty of people are going to go see a franchise film, or a superhero movie, or a family movie, no matter what critics say. The website is just one piece of the sprawling and often bewildering film landscape. As box office analyst Scott Mendelson wrote at Forbes :. But it is not magic. Is it a reliable judge of… characters … Okay, okay, hold your tomatoes please.
Rotten Tomatoes started in and it quickly became moviegoers go-to for reviews. Critics have suggested that there is much more nuance and complication when it comes to the correlation between a Rotten Tomatoes rating and ticket sales.
And while we will not get into that in this article, I think there is something to be said psychologically about seeing a rating right before you make your choice. I know for me, the ubiquitous nature of a Rotten Tomatoes score has made me feel like they hold more weight than they once did. But do they really hold more weight? How is the score actually calculated? And how are critics curated? The Tomatometer score is calculated after five reviews.
As the reviews come in, The Tomatometer measures the positive reviews against the negative ones and assigns either an overall score of fresh or rotten rating to the film or television show.
Rotten Tomatoes is careful in its Critic curation. It aggregates those who have been regularly putting out movie reviews over the last two years, and those who are considered active by Rotten Tomatoes standards. While there are about 3, accepted reviewers see the Tomatometer-approved critics criteria , usually only several hundred are actively reviewing for any given film.
And Top Critics are counted with a separate score. So while the the Rotten Tomatoes rating system is really just general consensus, you can see some of the more renowned critics in a different space. They, in front of IMDB , are one of the most trusted sources for accurate, critical ratings on all your favorite movies. But where exactly do all the critical scores come from? And what do they mean? When you click on a movie on Rotten Tomatoes, the first thing you see are two independent scores.
In regards to critical reviews, there are three categories that a film can fall under: rotten, fresh, and certified fresh. A positive review is usually marked by a score of 6 or more out of 10, but there is also room for interpretation as to what a positive score can be due to the wide variety of rating systems that critics use.
Ultimately, it falls to the curators of Rotten Tomatoes to clarify whether a review is positive or negative, and categorize it as such. As a side note, the overall percentage that you see at the top of the screen is the total amount of reviewers that scored the film positively. Got it? Rotten Tomatoes deems that all critics meet a set of eligibility guidelines that are meant to exemplify that this person or publication is influential and experienced enough to write well-articulated reviews.
They do this through an application-based system with some of the requirements being: you must have been writing reviews for at least two years that are being published through a non-self-published source, whether that be online or print. To put it simply, most Rotten Tomatoes reviewers are qualified to review films and have already been doing so, consistently, on a different platform. It also needs to change from a positive-or-negative based percentage score to a comprehensive rating from each reviewer that is averaged.
Letterboxd gives users a 1 to 5-star rating scale with increments of. When connecting back to the Citizen Kane and Paddington 2 debacle, the former currently has an aggregated score on Letterboxd of 4. She graduated from the University of Oregon in with a B. By Jordan Williams Published Apr 29, Share Share Tweet Email 0.
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