Since January 2010, Rotten Tomatoes has been owned by Flixster, which was in turn acquired by Warner Bros. in 2011. In February 2016, Rotten Tomatoes and its parent site Flixster were sold to Comcast's Fandango ticketing company. Warner Bros. retained a minority stake in the merged entities, including Fandango.
Rotten Tomatoes started in 2000 and it quickly became moviegoers go-to for reviews. But ever since Fandango acquired the company, it's become even more well-known adding something called a “Tomatometer” score next to every movie and ticket listing.
Whose movie ratings are more trustworthy, IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes? IMDb's rating are trustworthy in telling you the average rating given to movies by visitors to that website. Rotten Tomatoes ratings are trustworthy in telling you the percentage of film critics who gave movies a positive review.
Rotten Tomatoes has been a go-to source for movie reviews for years - and its ratings can make or break a film's success. But some say the site has major flaws in its ratings system.
On the film review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, films that every surveyed critic considered bad have a 0% rating. As of 2023, only 44 films with more than 20 reviews have received this rating.
Rotten Tomatoes is now owned by Fandango Media, and it uses Fandango's movie ticket purchase system so that users can purchase movie tickets directly from its site. So, some of Rotten Tomatoes revenues also come from a fee it collects for each online ticket purchase.
The founders sold the company for an undisclosed amount in 2004 to IGN Entertainment, which was acquired by News Corp. for $650 million the following year. News Corp. sold Rotten Tomatoes to movie discovery startup Flixster in 2010, which was later bought by Warner Bros. Fandango, a unit of Comcast Corp.
The scoring system of Rotten Tomatoes is heavily biased due to genre bias, selection bias, time bias, and recency bias. The reviews lack parity and context, making them untrustworthy. Rotten Tomatoes' audience scoring system was completely broken in 2010, with a flood of reviews drastically changing scores.
In a statement, Rotten Tomatoes wrote, “We take the integrity of our scores seriously and do not tolerate any attempts to manipulate them. We have a dedicated team who monitors our platforms regularly and thoroughly investigates and resolves any suspicious activity.” And yet manipulation still happens.
Citizen Kane (1941), starring and directed by Orson Welles, has topped several international polls, including five consecutive decades at number 1 in the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound decennial poll of critics.
The average Rotten Tomatoes user will see a 97 percent score as nearly a masterpiece. “It has to be good,” they might say, or commercials will tell them, “It's the best-reviewed movie of the year!”
The 99% Club: You'll find it, way past 98% on the Tomatometer, but just before 100%. Inside, a coterie of cinema's practically-finest, movies promising an experience beyond most others – movies that are almost perfect.
Although the name "Rotten Tomatoes" connects to the practice of audiences throwing rotten tomatoes in disapproval of a poor stage performance, the direct inspiration for the name from Duong, Lee, and Wang came from an equivalent scene in the 1992 Canadian film Léolo.
While we actively gather information from and verify items with studios and filmmakers, the bulk of our information is submitted by people in the industry and visitors like you! In addition to using as many sources as we can, our data goes through consistency checks to ensure it's as accurate and reliable as possible.
Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average).
Both platforms include user reviews and ratings, but their weightage varies. Rotten Tomatoes prominently displays the Audience Score, while Metacritic incorporates user and critic reviews into its Metascore. Users seeking a platform where their voice has a more substantial impact prefer Rotten Tomatoes.
The closest competitor to rottentomatoes.com are tvguide.com, imdb.com and themoviedb.org. To understand more about rottentomatoes.com and its competitors, sign up for a free account to explore Semrush's Traffic Analytics and Market Explorer tools.
7. 'Good' - This movie is really worth watching and you would watch it again spontaneously, but not too often. It's just not that good that you would say to your friends that they would really miss out on something if they didn't watch it.
When at least 60% of reviews for a movie or TV show are positive, a red tomato is displayed to indicate its Fresh status. When less than 60% of reviews for a movie or TV show are positive, a green splat is displayed to indicate its Rotten status.
