Is Rotten Tomatoes Still Reliable? A Statistical Analysis
Can Hollywood's stamp of artistic excellence still be trusted?
Intro: Why Is Everything "Certified Fresh"?
I stayed in a hotel recently, which means I watched cable television, which means I consumed commercials that I could not skip—and some of these commercials advertised upcoming movie releases. Promo after promo, I noticed an unmistakable pattern: every film was "Certified Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, with this seal of approval serving as the ad's climactic selling point.
After five days of "Certified Fresh" movie propaganda, I began to grow suspicious. If every movie is un-rotten, then one of two things must be true:
Humanity Has Stopped Producing Bad Art: After a century of trial and error, mankind has perfected the art of cinema, as proven by recent masterworks like Cats, Space Jam: A New Legacy, the live-action Snow White, Red One, and Joker: Folie à Deux. Critics, who were once joyless automatons thriving on takedowns of human creativity, now bask in this golden age of moviemaking, lavishing praise upon the timeless artistry of The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros. Discovery.
Rotten Tomatoes Has Changed: Perhaps this seemingly objective platform has been compromised, potentially by corporate interests 🙉. If this reads as conspiratorial, that's because it is (albeit a decidedly low-stakes conspiracy).
After delving into the data, this "conspiracy" seems more like "fact" (which makes for a rather boring conspiracy theory).
So today, we'll delve into the suspicious recalibration of Rotten Tomatoes, tracing when and how Hollywood's foremost stamp of artistic excellence turned rotten.
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Has Rotten Tomatoes Fundamentally Changed?
Rotten Tomatoes was founded in 1998 to aggregate reviews of Jackie Chan films. Within months, its creators recognized the concept's broader potential and expanded the platform to cover all movies. The website quickly became a trusted proxy for critical consensus, a role it has maintained for over 25 years.
Rotten Tomatoes appraises movies through its trademarked "Tomatometer" score, calculated as the percentage of critic reviews that are deemed "positive." Both a lukewarm 3-out-of-5 star rating and an effusive rave of cinematic brilliance qualify as "positive" on the platform. Films with a Tomatometer score above 60% receive a "fresh" label; anything below this threshold is branded "rotten."
While many nitpick Rotten Tomatoes' blunt approach to aggregation, much of the site's appeal lies in its straightforward methodology. According to polling from The Morning Consult, nearly a third of Americans have checked the Tomatometer before seeing a film, making Rotten Tomatoes Hollywood's most influential tastemaker by a significant margin. The site is performatively transparent, which contributes to its perceived integrity and broad consumer trust, while also making its underlying mechanics readily auditable.
In a well-calibrated system, critic scores should remain stable over time unless there's a meaningful shift in film quality. So why has the average Tomatometer score increased over the past decade? What changed: the movies or the metric?
And here is where the intrigue deepens: this rating shift coincides with Fandango's 2016 acquisition of Rotten Tomatoes 🙉. One might consider this a conflict of interest, given Fandango is America's largest movie-ticketing platform, partially owned by NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery (and that person would be correct!).
If I had a corkboard for tracking this conspiracy theory, it would be incredibly lame: I'd have a picture of Rotten Tomatoes and a photo of Fandango, with a single spool of yarn connecting the two. This does not "go all the way to the top," and there is probably no mention of these dealings in The Epstein Files.
While these two data points paint an unflattering portrait of Rotten Tomatoes, they do not prove whether the site's aggregation process or scoring methods have fundamentally changed. To test this, I decided to look at the relationship between Rotten Tomatoes' critic score and its user-generated audience score (the latter aggregates reviews from moviegoers who have seen a film).
While critics and audiences don't always agree, their sentiments tend to be strongly correlated—a wave of critical pans usually signals similar disdain from viewers, and vice-versa. Before 2016, a higher audience score generally went hand in hand with a strong Tomatometer rating.
On a year-to-year basis, critic and audience scores moved in tandem, demonstrating a stable correlation until 2016, when a sharp divergence emerged—just as the average Tomatometer rating began to climb.
The inevitable follow-up question is how one alters the Tomatometer within the site's seemingly strict parameters.
Ultimately, Rotten Tomatoes has control over two major inputs to its Tomatometer score:
Whether a review is considered "fresh" or "rotten."
Which reviews count toward the Tomatometer.
Tweaking the definition of "fresh" would spark immediate backlash from the site's critic base, who could use their platforms to publicly bash Rotten Tomatoes. A much subtler lever is critic selection: expanding the reviewer pool to a group of writers who (coincidentally) produce more favorable appraisals.
Indeed, following the Fandango acquisition, the average number of reviewers per mainstream release increased by 40 to 70 critics.
It's feasible that the platform broadened its critic pool to account for newfangled digital media outlets like The Ringer and BuzzFeed, thereby allowing Rotten Tomatoes to evolve with an ever-changing media ecosystem. Yet when we examine the most prolific publications added to the site over the last decade, we find a collection of outlets that lack name recognition.
As someone who also writes words on the internet, I'm not going to go out of my way to dunk on Denerstein Unleashed and KKFI-FM (Kansas City), but I will say this after reviewing around 50 of these sites:
Many of these publications are hosted on outdated blogging platforms.
Several of these sites do not load properly on my mobile web browser.
Many of these blogs seem like secondary sources of income or passion projects.
To account for this influx of reviewers, Rotten Tomatoes has created a "Top Critic" designation reserved for established media outlets, such as The New York Times and The Atlantic. However, this label has no special bearing on a film's top-line Tomatometer score and is largely incorporated into ancillary aspects of the site. Rotten Tomatoes claims that these reviewer additions were made to diversify its critic pool by including more women, people of color, and underrepresented groups—a statement I can neither confirm nor deny. What I can say is this: these new reviewers fundamentally altered the site's steady state, and the platform did little to account for this underlying shift. Maybe increased critic scores are a happy accident, albeit one with extremely suspicious timing.
Furthermore, this emerging class of lesser-known Tomatometer-approved critics has become a strategic asset for Hollywood studios. According to a 2023 Vulture analysis, PR firms will actively court reviewers from smaller outlets to inflate Tomatometer scores in the run-up to a film's release. Apparently, a cottage industry has emerged around recruiting non-Top Critics to secure a "fresh" label pre-release, which studios can then brandish as a marketing hook.
I don't have any hard data to verify Vulture's claims, but one could see how an expanded pool of Tomatometer-approved hobbyists might be ripe for manipulation. With the right mix of critics, a "fresh" rating can be engineered to coincide with a film's opening weekend.
Final Thoughts: Is This So Bad?
You'd think after spending a few hours deconstructing the Tomatometer that I'd be firmly against the site's alleged-but-also-somewhat-obvious review inflation. Yet my immediate lizard-brain reaction was strangely pro-inflation, surprising even me: maybe Rotten Tomatoes being (ostensibly) rigged isn't such a bad thing? I'm not proud of this knee-jerk response, so much as it speaks to the state of movies in 2025.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, box office coverage frames every weekend as a referendum on the film industry's continued existence. Will Marvel return to form? If not, does that mean cinema is dead? Can A24 single-handedly save indie film? If not, does that mean cinema is dead? Every week, movies are either "so over" or "so back," and it's exhausting. If you love moviegoing and the theatrical experience, you want nothing more than for people to stop watching Love Is Blind Brazil, leave their houses, and go to the movies.
Enter Rotten Tomatoes, a debatably flawed yet widely influential website that is a questionable proxy for critical acclaim. For whatever reason, people trust this platform and will decide to leave their homes based on its recommendation. Rotten Tomatoes is the focal point of television promos because it can create demand where it previously did not exist.
If I were the owner of a movie-ticketing app or a sicko-utilitarian like Sam Bankman-Fried, I'd argue the ends justify the means: the average score goes up, more movies are deemed "fresh," people go to theaters, and cinema lives to fight another day. Unfortunately, I am not a sicko-utilitarian, which means I am now advocating against my best interests. Hooray for me.
In the short term, inflated scores may lure people to theaters once or twice. But in the long run, it's better if people enjoy their experience at the theater (by, you know, seeing a good movie). Despite my lizard-brain reaction, I believe long-term thinking usually wins out, while short-term shenanigans are always rotten in hindsight. Although what was once deemed "rotten" is now considered "certifiably fresh," so who knows.
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Speaking from personal experience as a critic, it’s definitely gamed by PR. Have been approached to ensure positive reviews get counted and even been haggled with to flip a rotten to a fresh. It’s a good reminder of why Metacritic is a vastly superior barometer of a movie’s critical standing, but I cannot deny that RT has a great internal team working on it that does a lot to expand the voices that get recognition for opining about film (even if it’s cynically co-opted for other purposes).
1. Love this.
2. Love Dobrenko.
3. About a month or two ago, my 17-year-old son swore off Rotten Tomatoes forever upon learning that MEGAN has a higher critic's score than Shawshank Redemption. It comes up more often in conversation than it probably should in normal family homes.