Rotten Tomatoes Changed The Role Of Film Critics. But Is That A Good Thing?

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🗓️ 15 September 2023

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

If you're over a certain age and you love movies, when you think "movie critic", you probably picture Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert and their popular TV shows. Their iconic "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" move made it clear what each of them thought about a film.

In some ways, the movie review website Rotten Tomatoes is the opposite of Siskel and Ebert. Their viewers depended on the insights of two individuals that they trusted, and felt they knew.

Rotten Tomatoes aggregates and averages reviews from lots of critics to assign a movie a number ranking, and declare it "fresh" or "rotten".

Since its launch 25 years ago, it's become the the go to site for lots of potential movie goers, offering everything they need to decide whether or not a movie is worth seeing.

But for a while now, there have been complaints about the way the site ranks films. And concerns that those rankings unfairly influence whether a movie succeeds or bombs.

Host Scott Detrow talks to Lane Brown, who took the site to task in a recent article on Vulture, and film critic Jamie Broadnax, editor-in-chief of the culture site, Black Girl Nerds.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Right now, members of the actors and screenwriters unions are still on strike, walking picket
0:12.3	minds in Hollywood.
0:13.7	But that hasn't stopped movie studios from pushing the content they already have out
0:17.0	to the public, and that's how you get ads like these.
0:31.6	And if you're trying to decide what movie to see, and sometimes that's a hard choice because
0:34.7	ticket prices can be $20 or more, a film's biggest selling point might be this.
0:47.0	Since this launch 25 years ago, the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes has become
0:59.7	the be-all-end-all for many people deciding whether or not to see a movie.
1:04.0	If you told a friend they had to see Oppenheimer to help convince them maybe you mentioned
1:08.6	it had a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, it was fresh.
1:13.0	Other movies like The None Two lurking at just 47%, maybe not so much.
1:18.3	Like any form of traditional media, I think the role of the critic has changed as the power
1:23.6	of the critic has changed.
1:26.2	Eric Deggins is NPR's TV critic.
1:28.1	He got into the profession during the days when one critic could sway public opinion, and
1:33.1	he says those days are gone.
1:35.0	You know, at least when you're talking about sort of marquee-name critics, the Roger Evers,
1:41.4	the Gene Siskoles, you know, the folks who could determine the fate of a movie with a
1:48.0	single review or at least a clutch of reviews, that isn't the case anymore.
1:56.0	Consider this.
1:57.4	People use Rotten Tomatoes to get a consensus on whether or not to watch a movie or TV
2:01.3	show, but there are flaws in the system.
	...

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