Rotten tomatoes how does it work

Hidden label. How does Rotten Tomatoes work, anyway? By: Conor Grant. Photo: RottenTomatoes. First things first: How does the Tomatometer work? And Rotten Tomatoes got big almost by accident The company was founded in by a bunch of grad-school students who wanted to rank Jackie Chan movies. But after becoming popular over the course of a decade, the site got sucked into an acquisition roller coaster: In — Rotten Tomatoes bought by Flixster In — Flixster bought by Warner Bros.

Business and tech news in 5 minutes or less. Thank you for subscribing. Your submission failed. Please try again! Unsubscribe whenever. Recent Posts. Home equity is the difference between the value of a home and the amount still owed on it. If the value of a home stays flat, home equity rises slowly — one mortgage payment …. In the 12 months ended Sept. Is crime-solving a good way to fall in love?

Industrial farming has created some big chickens. A century ago, a broiler chicken i. Ok, this is getting a bit ridiculous. Over cryptocurrencies are now …. Its page employee training manual includes: 1 full page on …. The official reason behind the move: Alphabet …. The economics of pumpkin patches. Why airlines need business travel to return. Unless these critics self-submit their reviews, it is up to specially hired curators to collect and tally the number of Fresh or Rotten reviews in order to generate Tomatometer scores.

The Audience Score, similarly, is the percentage of positive reviews from audiences. For calculating the Audience Score, Rotten Tomatoes considers reviews over 3. Founded in , CinemaScore is still among the most popular measures for feeling out the audience reaction to a movie. Most commonly seen across social media platforms as a slick graphic with a letter grade beside a movie poster, many have never stopped to question where that grade comes from:.

Unlike online aggregate or submission sites, CinemaScore is calculated through a real-world poll. To describe it best, CinemaScore is a tool to measure how well an eager audience is satisfied: this is why most blockbusters can be expected to do reasonably well. If an audience receives what they expect, it is more likely to get a higher score, thus making it important for studios evaluating the success of marketing campaigns.

For more information about CinemaScore, you can visit their website. A good Rotten Tomatoes score indicates strong critical consensus, and that can be good for smaller films in particular. The result, they hope, is increased interest and ticket sales when the movie opens in other cities. And the more recent The Big Sick became one of last summer's most beloved films, helped along by its 98 percent rating.

But a bad score for a small film can help ensure that it will close quickly, or play in fewer cities overall. Its potential box office earnings, in turn, will inevitably take a hit. A good Rotten Tomatoes score, for example, doesn't necessarily guarantee a film will be a hit. Still, studios certainly seem to believe the score makes a difference.

Last summer, studios blamed Rotten Tomatoes scores and by extension, critics when poorly reviewed movies like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales , Baywatch , and The Mummy performed below expectations at the box office. The Emoji Movie , for example, was critically panned, garnering an abysmal 6 percent Rotten Tomatoes score. And the more you think about it, the less surprising it is that plenty of people bought tickets to The Emoji Movie in spite of its bad press: It's an animated movie aimed at children that faced virtually no theatrical competition, and it opened during the summer, when kids are out of school.

Great reviews might have inflated its numbers, but almost universally negative ones didn't seem to hurt it much. 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.