Website / Rotten Tomatoes

An enormously popular and influential filmsite that links to movie reviews across North America. The RT site then flags the reviews as either skewing positive ('fresh') or negative ('rotten') and gives the film an overall percentile rating based on how many there are of each type. For example, a movie with nine positive ratings and one negative would receive a 90%. If the reviewer also has a grading system beyond the fresh/rotten scale, then the percentage is averaged into the 'Average Rating' grade cleverly hidden beneath the Tomatometer. Movies with a rating of 60% or over are officially dubbed 'Fresh' marked with a red tomato/dot, those below are consigned to the 'Rotten' pile with a green splat/dot.

The coveted 'Certified Fresh' rating is only given to a movie which has 40 or more reviews (5 of which must be "cream of the crop", meaning well-known critics like Roger Ebert). Once 'Certified Fresh', a movie keeps that designation unless the rating later drops below 60%.

All this makes it a good place to get a quick look at how the overall media buzz is trending for any given film. Following the percentage in the days up to the film's main release has become a popular pop-cult sport: watching the score rise and fall on the films you're looking forward to, crossing your fingers that it stays above that magic 60% until the site makes the call with the consensus statement about the film. It's less reliable for older films or tv movies, which might only have a handful of reviews, which are typically mostly positive.

Has expanded in recent years to take in production details, thus includes pre-release reviews, articles and often trailer links. They have also branched into coverage of critical reviews of television shows, though this aspect of the site remains in beta.

Can be found here. Has been spun off into a TV show on Current TV, simply titled The Rotten Tomatoes Show.

Rotten Tomatoes has forums, but unfortunately they were remodeled a while back and the new version actually feels like something of a downgrade. Furthermore, both their comments and forums are often infested with spambots, which they don't seem to have any capability to stop. And the forum drama that goes on over there is infamous. On July 15, 2014, the current forums were placed in a permanent read-only state, to be migrated into a new system.

In November 2012, they discontinued allowing comments to be posted on individual reviews of movies after an incident that occurred regarding reviews of The Dark Knight Rises, which ironically was extremely well-received by critics.

From 2011 to 2016, Time Warner owned Rotten Tomatoes outright through digital distribution service Flixster, which its Warner Bros. Entertainment division acquired that year in an unrelated effort to improve movie-viewing options^note Very suspicious..., but no more so than when the classic movie review TV show, Siskel & Ebert, was distributed by Disney's Buena Vista. Fandango, a 30/70 joint venture between NBC Universal and Warners, now owns both RT and Flixster.

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