How Did Rotten Tomatoes Become a Credible Source of Reviews?
The Blind Eternities forum
Posted on Oct. 6, 2017, 5:05 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
Rotten Tomatoes was once a minor and underground website, primarily for self-identified nerds and geeks who went against the mainstream media and were proud of being hipsters who liked media that did not have mainstream popularity.
However, in recent years, it has become a credible and valid source of movie reviews, to the point that many new films will boast about having a high rating at Rotten Tomatoes as part of their marketing campaigns, so I am wondering how that happened; how did RT go from an underground community to a credible and highly-regarded collection of critics? What does everyone else say about this?
Oloro_Magic says... #3
Rotten Tomatoes is also very easy to misunderstand, most people just look at the percentage and think, "wow, this movie has 94% which means it is great," but in reality the average score on that same film can be 6/10 just 94% of reviews are technically positive. People tend to not pay much attention to the scores or certified fresh when looking up movie reviews quickly and so rotten tomatoes can easily be misinterpreted. There can also be great discrepancy between audience and critic reviews and movie studies can use the more favorable ones in a general post about rotten tomatoes. For example one of my favorite independent art films "Night Moves" (the Jesse Eisenberg one) has great critic reviews and used that in marketing, however its audience reviews are awful as it really is a film for critics.
October 6, 2017 6:02 p.m.
Homura_Akemi b-b-but there are all those funky fresh dance moves at the end to show us how hip Kirk and all his mates are.
lol
Argy says... #2
It's been the movie studios themselves who promoted the site by mentioning how high they got on the Tomatometre in their publicity.
That's because they learned that they can manipulate the Tomatometre quite easily.
Note, even Kirk Cameron's god awful Saving Christmas clawed it's way up from 0 to 6, by getting all his followers to spam the site with high scores.
Next question: Is the film mother! actually great, or a case of the Emperor's new clothes?
(hint: it's the latter)
October 6, 2017 5:11 p.m.