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It is Wednesday, September 17th.

A generation ago, if I asked you who is the most influential, critical voice in movies?

Probably say, Siskel and Ebert, A.O. Scott at the New York Times, maybe Ken Choran at the L.A. Times.

They could really help movies they liked.

And the dreaded thumbs way down would be a death penalty for a certain

kind of movie. Today, no critic really matters, not really. The internet and social media has

unleashed a torrent of opinions on movies and TV and everything else, even podcasts. And in place

of individual critics, the single most influential force in movie criticism is now Rotten Tomatoes,

the aggregation site that deems good movies certified fresh via their critics' score.

But Rotten Tomatoes is kind of controversial in Hollywood.

Filmmakers hate it because it's binary.

It deems each review either positive or negative, not allowing much room for nuances like its rival, Metacritic does, when assigning a numbered score.

And increasingly, there are a whole bunch of random voices included amongst those more established critics.

Rotten Tomatoes, which most people don't know, is actually owned by NBC Universal with an investment from Warner Brothers.

It's actually part of the new spinoff company called Versant that's happening.

They say that they broadened out the pool of critics to address criticism that the site

was too elitist, to white, to mail, etc.

But as I wrote in my Puck newsletter a couple of weeks ago, the result has been that

the tomato meter scores

have gone up about 13% over the past decade. Yes, great inflation on rotten tomatoes.

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