It's Time for Critics to Leave Rotten Tomatoes

Like a lot of critics, I used to think of being approved by Rotten Tomatoes was a badge of honor. A website that compiled the reviews of critics deemed that my work was worthy of consideration alongside my peers, and so I craved that validation. But as I got older, I realized that Rotten Tomatoes didn’t deserve to be an arbiter of quality, and certainly couldn’t bestow respect upon an individual critic simply because it allowed them to participate in content aggregation. While Rotten Tomatoes professes to uplift critics, in practice the site has only served the diminish individual voices and serve the marketing efforts of studios.

Billing itself as “the leading aggregator of movie and TV show reviews from critics,” Rotten Tomatoes has leveraged its famous “Tomatometer” as a hot-or-not ranking for movies. If more than 60% of critics like a film, it’s rated “fresh”; if less than 60% do, it’s rated “rotten.” While seasoned critics would argue that the quality of a film is more nuanced, filmgoers have long used Tomatometer rankings to decide which movies deserve their time and money.

Rotten Tomatoes was never a perfect system, but a new article by Lane Brown in Vulture shows that studios are well aware of how to game RT, and that one publicity company, Bunker 15, was paying critics for positive reviews to boost the Rotten Tomatoes score.

It’s easy to simply dismiss Bunker 15 as a bad actor. After Vulture asked RT about these boosted reviews, RT responded by delisting a number of Bunker 15 movies from their website and issued a warning to writers: “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.”

The problem is that even when Rotten Tomatoes is working as intended, it’s a system that shortchanges both critics and audiences.

RT will argue that they help both critics and audiences. For critics, Rotten Tomatoes is a way to drive traffic to your review, thereby boosting your own credentials. However, in practice, this does not happen. During the timeframe when I submitted reviews to Rotten Tomatoes (2018-2021), I never once saw a bump in traffic because of it, and other critics tell me they’ve had a similar experience. That shouldn’t be too surprising, because Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t really celebrate single reviews or single reviewers—in fact, they’re constantly doing the opposite. By centering the Tomatometer, RT invites moviegoers to disregard full length reviews as a TL;DR, taking their Fresh or Rotten rating and leaving all the rest behind.

And yet RT’s Tomatometer is powered by the free labor that critics supply. According to its own FAQ page, RT does not employ critics. Without critics, Rotten Tomatoes would lose its main draw, which is aggregating reviews to come up with a score that allows readers to not bother reading individual critics in the first place. The metric is imperfect, corrupted, and in service of a company that’s owned by Comcast (a media company that owns Universal and NBC as well as their subsidiaries) and Fandango (which exists to sell movie tickets).

As detailed in Brown’s piece, this has led to a system where Rotten Tomatoes, rather than valuing criticism, finds a way to obscure it so that it can maximize ticket sales, as was the case earlier this year with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. The vaunted Tomatometer is essentially juked to its maximum value when tickets go on sale, and then deflated when more critics are able to weigh in.

Audiences like the idea of Rotten Tomatoes for ease of use, and with ticket prices being so expensive, I can understand the appeal of seeing a number, and if the number is “good” taking the plunge to buy a ticket. But audiences are poorly served because Rotten Tomatoes isn’t some humble aggregator working to provide an unambiguous piece of data to inform a purchase. It is now fully a marketing tool, and just like studios endeavor to pay TikTokers or find the right celebratory blurb, it’s deceptive and ultimately devalues the thing—critical praise—it supposedly upholds.

I’m not surprised that studios are trying to game the system for maximum positive publicity (there are, after all, millions of dollars on the line), but there’s no reason for any critic to play along. Rotten Tomatoes held itself out as a way to bestow prestige and legitimacy, but there’s nothing prestigious or legitimate about a score that’s been massaged off the backs of unpaid writers. Publicists like when you’re a RT-approved critic, but critics know that being RT-approved is meaningless. The site is flooded with critics now, no one is looking too hard about who’s legit and who isn’t (again, RT had to be informed by a reporter about the Bunker 15 issue; they didn’t come to it on their own despite their “dedicated team”), and ultimately it doesn’t matter to RT because they’re not in the business of supporting critics; they’re in the business of supporting studios and publicists.

The good news is that critics are under no obligation to submit their reviews to Rotten Tomatoes, whether those reviews are positive or negative. I don’t know how to remove oneself as a critic (the FAQ doesn’t have that answer, and the site only tells you how to become RT-approved, not how to leave), but I do know that it’s easy not to submit reviews. To my fellow critics, I would simply say that your work has value, and that your longevity will depend on people finding you as an individual rather than as part of an aggregate.

For audiences, their work will get a bit harder, but not much. They’ll have to find critics that they trust. They’ll have to find that film criticism is not simply a Rotten/Fresh rating, but rather an argument about a movie, and if that argument is compelling enough, then a prospective viewer will commit the time and money to see a movie. But once you find the critics you trust, you’ll be supporting people who don’t have a hidden agenda. Sometimes you’ll agree with this critic and other times you won’t, but at least you’ll know they’re not trying to separate you from your money as quickly as possible before you get wise.