Hey, I'm Sam Sanders. You're listening to Into It from Vulture in New York Magazine.

This week, how rotten tomatoes might actually be rotten.

So, if you're like me, before you go see a movie, you try to find out if it's good or not.

And chances are, the website you will use to find that out is rotten tomatoes.

It's the one that aggregates a lot of reviews for movies and then gives them a score.

Well, they call it a tomato meter and it gives a fresh rating. I know. I know.

So many people use rotten tomatoes. They even make these like, man on the street YouTube videos

to show just how popular rotten tomatoes is.

Do you know what rotten tomatoes is? Love rotten tomatoes.

It's a rating site. The best place to get ratings for movies.

I look at it pretty frequently. I don't think they would taste very good.

But recently, one of my colleagues at Vulture did a deep investigation into rotten tomatoes.

My name is Lane Brown. I am a features writer for New York Magazine. Before that, I was actually one of the original editors of Vulture.

So a real true Vulture OG. Exactly.

Lane found that, yes, rotten tomatoes may be extremely popular, but it's not all that reliable.

And a lot of movie studios and Hollywood companies, they gain the rotten tomatoes system

to maybe make bad movies look good. This episode, we ask, is rotten tomatoes rating system broken?

And our studios kind of scamming us with it. We will get into all of that after the break.

Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice

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