Rotten Tomatoes Reviews: Who is right?
Written by: Padraig Chapman
Have you ever watched a movie, and really liked it but then you were curious what other people thought about it and was surprised to see that the critics actually hate it? This was the case for me when I looked up reviews for the movie Zoolander where I was surprised to see that it only had a 64% on Rotten Tomatoes(RT).
This is still considered fresh on RT but 59% is rotten so it's more so considered mixed if anything. This score. becomes especially shocking when you see the fan score is 80%, making almost a 20% difference which is pretty massive. The way Rotten Tomatoes works is, it takes a bunch of reviewers scores of movies and then averages them to be a percentage. Anything 60% or above is considered “fresh” or good, anything 59% or below is rotten or bad. RT also has a critic score
which takes an actual journalist’s score and an audience score where people can rate movies themselves on the RT website.
After this I went down the rabbit hole searching up all of my favorite movies and I found that a lot of comedy movies are reviewed poorly, while high budget blockbusters with big name actors will get reviewed positively. Movies like Inside Out 2 which has a 91% critic score and Moana 2 which has a 61%, which while not a great score this movie has gotten a lot more attention than others. However, like with Zoolander all of these movies had a positive fan rating.
But are these critics right, or do they at least have valid criticism? Well taking a look at some of these reviews it is clear that these movies are held to a standard they will never reach and that’s because they aren’t trying to be. For example Wally Hammond for Time Out says, “The self-absorbed world of fashion proves notoriously hard to parody or satirise, and Stiller’s insights are neither original nor artful.” This movie is not trying to be artful at all, it’s trying to
just be funny and it is.
When a director makes a film they have a goal, it could be something more insightful that makes the viewer think, most comedies are nothing more than spoofs trying to be funny, this article even says that the movie is funny or at least the premise is. So if it's funny and all it’s trying to be is funny then how is it a bad movie?
The Movie Good Burger(1997) made by Nickelodeon is another interesting example. It has a critic score on RT of 33% which is really bad, but the Audience score is 63%. This is a huge difference, but what’s really interesting is if you look at the audience review a large majority of them say to not listen to the critics and that the movie is good.
There is this disconnect between the critics and audience especially with these comedy movies. But why is this? Catherine Rampell from the New York Times thinks it’s because these critics have to see so many movies, they can’t pick what they want and are obligated to see these movies. This is probably true and to be fair if I had to sit through a romcom I would rate it bad because I don’t like those. However I feel like a lot of these movies are just funny and anybody would like them.
Maybe for these big journalism companies they should have critics that like a type of movie be the one to review it. For example they have a person that likes action and horror then they would only review those movies. A big problem seems to be an unwillingness to say that the movies is not for them and to instead blame the movie when they don’t like it, again if the movie isn’t trying to be something more than funny and it is, how is it the filmmaker’s fault that a critic that clearly does not like comedies did not enjoy the movie.
Another example of this is Napoleon Dynamite(2004). This movie is beloved by a ton of people and for a good reason. The amount of times the tots scene or the dancing scene pops up on my instagram is countless and every time it does it makes me laugh. There is a guy on instagram whose whole thing is that he just talks and looks like napoleon. The fans really like this movie.
The RT score on this is actually balanced well with the audience score both being in the 70%, that is until you look at the top critic score which is a 66%. This is not an awful score but it still does not show the quality of this movie.
So at this point it’s probably fair to say that the critics have a skewed view on these movies but to see if this is really true I decided to run a survey with real people and not just random people on the internet. For the survey I had eight movies that people had to rate from 1 to 5, 1 being awful and 5 being amazing. I had four movies that served as a baseline to see if the audience scores were accurate. The baselines were for movies that both critics and fans liked, one that both did not like, one that the critics liked but the audience did not, and vice versa. The other four were Zoolander, Good Burger, Napoleon Dynamite, and Ferris Bueler’s Day Off. I picked Ferris Bueler because it has the same problem as Napoleon Dynamite where the top critic score is bad but all critics and audience is positive. It has a 50% top critic score which is awful and I know that a bunch of people like that movie.
