The movie industry is one of the largest industries in the world, and in any kind of entertainment industry, there will be critics who review the product. Rotten Tomatoes is one of the largest organizations that score movies by compiling hundreds of reviews from hundreds of critics.
Many casual movie goers like to use Rotten Tomatoes to determine whether they should spend their hard earned dollars on a movie or not. They look at the score of the movie, and decide if it is worth seeing. If the score is high, they go, if it is low, many will opt to pass.
That in itself is reasonable, but the reason I dislike Rotten Tomatoes is because of the way they determine their scores. The way they score a movie is with a percentage, if x percent of critics liked the movie, the score would be x percent. And there is no problem with that either, but the problem comes when they determine if a critic liked a movie or not. For rotten tomatoes, the movie is either “fresh” or “rotten” and if a critic gives the movie a score of anything less than 2.5/4, the vote is classified as rotten.
If the problem with this system is not already obvious, an analogy should make it quite clear. So lets say we had two movies, and each was being reviewed by ten critics, for the first movie, every critic gives it 2/4, that movie would receive 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, and now for the second movie, every critic rated it 2.5/4, that movie would receive 100%. That is the fundamental issue with the scoring system, it is a common misconception, that the percentage is an average of the score that the critics gave, but it is in fact not that, but rather a ratio of critics who liked the movie to those who didn’t.
This could lead to a lot of inaccurate representations for the overall quality of any movie, and besides, shouldn’t we watch the movie and judge it for ourselves?