For the rest of the week, both moviegoers and Warner Bros. executives will be biting their nails as they refresh the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, checking the updated "Tomatometer" number for Wonder Woman. The question isn’t whether or not most critics think Wonder Woman is any good, which has already been asked and answered. (As of this writing, Wonder Woman sits at a very positive 94 percent approval rating.)
The real question—as exemplified by a Vox post from earlier in the week, when Wonder Woman sat at 97 percent on the Tomatometer—was whether Wonder Woman would remain at such a high perch after all the reviews had been filed. At 97 percent, Wonder Woman would have been tied with The Incredibles for the highest-rated Rotten Tomatoes ranking for any superhero movie in history. At 94 percent, it’s tied with Marvel’s Iron Man. Thanks to Rotten Tomatoes, the meta-narrative of the week isn’t "Wonder Woman is great." It’s "Is Wonder Woman greater than every other superhero movie?"
And suddenly we have Rotten Tomatoes thrust into the position of Caesar in the gladiatorial arena of the box office: giving thumbs-up to movies that will go on to massive box-office grosses, or crushing movies that, uh, won’t. Earlier this week, Deadline quoted sources that blamed the relative box-office failures of both Baywatch and the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie on critics, with Rotten Tomatoes being singled out as the source of the problem:
"Insiders close to both films blame Rotten Tomatoes, with Pirates 5 and Baywatch respectively earning 32% and 19% Rotten. The critic aggregation site increasingly is slowing down the potential business of popcorn movies. Pirates 5 and Baywatch aren’t built for critics but rather general audiences, and once upon a time these types of films—a family adventure and a raunchy R-rated comedy—were critic-proof. Many of those in the industry severely question how Rotten Tomatoes computes the its ratings, and the fact that these scores run on Fandango (which owns RT) is an even bigger problem."
This paragraph chronicles a Hollywood in denial. (Friendly tip: If you want your movies to get better reviews, make better movies.) But there’s a germ of truth in that closing argument. There are some questionable things about Rotten Tomatoes. The review aggregator, which has been around for nearly two decades, has changed both the nature of film criticism and the broader cultural understanding of how film criticism actually works. And if you care about movies at all, it’s worth taking a closer look at what Rotten Tomatoes actually does.
Sure, Rotten Tomatoes is the perfect way to get a quick, broad snapshot of the overall critical reception for a movie. But a tool is only useful when you know how to use it, and Rotten Tomatoes hasn’t done a particularly good job teaching audiences what its numbers actually mean. The aggregator’s insistence on assigning a single, digestible number for each movie has the unfortunate side effect of crushing any nuance in the degree of "good" and "bad" that a film might possess. (Metacritic, a competing aggregator, attempts to correct for this problem by assigning each review a number between 0 and 100—but the site's independent process for actually arriving at those numbers, and the secretive process by which it assigns some reviews more weight than others, has also drawn criticism.)
Let’s put the flaw in the Rotten Tomatoes system into practical terms. To be clear: Wonder Woman’s 94 percent rating doesn’t mean that the movie is a 94 out of 100, just as Baywatch’s 18 percent rating doesn’t mean that the movie is an 18 out of 100. It means that 95 percent of critics thought there was more to admire about Wonder Woman than to dislike about it, and that 18 percent thought there was more to admire about Baywatch than to dislike about it. (Of course, there’s also selection bias in the critics that Rotten Tomatoes actually counts in that calculation—but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll put that aside.)
The Rotten Tomatoes website defines its numbers as "the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film or television show." But in practice, what Rotten Tomatoes does is eliminate the distinction between genuine passion and lukewarm acceptance—or, alternately, the distinction between lukewarm dislike and passionate hatred. Reviews that call Wonder Woman "mind-boggling and awe-inspiring" and "one of the best superhero films ever made" are lumped in with reviews that cite "lulls in the narrative energy" and call it "a decent but bland addition to the genre." Each is counted as a positive. Reviews that say Baywatch is "harmlessly fun" and "edges very close to guilty pleasure territory" are grouped with reviews that call it "everything that is wrong with Hollywood today" and "one of the worst films of the summer." Each is counted as a negative.
On the whole, Rotten Tomatoes' numbers are not without meaning. (Yes, the collective wisdom nailed it: Suicide Squad is terrible. [Ed Note: So twisted.]) But the algorithm has the unintentional side effect of disproportionately rewarding a certain kind of movie: A safe, focus-tested project engineered to court the largest possible audience. When it comes to Rotten Tomatoes, it’s better to make a competent, crowd-pleasing movie with mass appeal than a risky movie some will love and some will hate. The most obvious example is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which—over 15 movies to date—has never had a movie dip below that fabled 60 percent threshold: Not The Incredible Hulk (67 percent), not Iron Man 2 (72 percent), and not Thor: The Dark World (66 percent).
I didn’t hate any of those movies; they did what they set out to do, and that was enough for me. But I’d never defend them with the passion I feel for some polarizing "Rotten" movies that were destined to be rejected by a significant portion of the viewing audience: Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (53 percent), or The Comedy (45 percent), or Only God Forgives (41 percent). And the Rotten Tomatoes system also implies that enjoyment is the only reason to watch a movie. I hated Passengers (31 percent)—but I’d still encourage curious moviegoers to see it, so they can unpack the fascinatingly wrong-headed attitudes and ideas that led to a movie like Passengers for themselves.
If you took the time to dig, you might be surprised by how many of your favorite movies are designated "Rotten." (Home Alone—Rotten, at 55 percent!) But the implicit wisdom of the algorithm does a particular disservice to criticism, because few subjects inspire more visceral passion in a critic’s work than the love or hatred of a movie. Think about Pauline Kael’s enthusiastic (and then-controversial) rave for Bonnie & Clyde, or Roger Ebert’s deeply unconventional—but still thought-provoking—pan of Blue Velvet (which sits, today, at 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes). Or—to cite some very recent examples—the thoughtful, eloquent, and contextually valuable reviews by critics like Alison Willmore and Kate Erbland, whose unique reflections on Wonder Woman and its place in the modern cinematic landscape have been gathered by Rotten Tomatoes—along with all the other "positive" reviews—and placed under the unifying, stultifying, off-white beach umbrella they call "Fresh."
So the next time you’re clicking over to Rotten Tomatoes to see how a movie is faring with critics, here’s my advice: Use the site a little differently, and see what you can find. Don’t put your faith in that blind algorithm. Click around until you find a specific, singular review that gibes with your own feelings about a movie—or doesn’t, but in a way that makes you think about a movie in a way you might never have considered before. Pay attention to the critic who wrote it. Look them up, and see what else they’ve written, and see where it takes you. You might discover that the seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of the algorithm can’t possibly stack up to the wisdom of an individual critic whose work speaks to you in a way a number never could.