Stop Citing Rotten Tomatoes
Ratings are currency. The brunt of criticism, whether you’re writing it or reading it, is words, and words are work. In our entertainment-glutted present, when countless pieces of art compete for your precious time—there is always a new show to binge, a new game to play—people crave a shorthand to cut through the noise. And so, regardless of the specific metric—four stars! C plus! 9 out of 10 fireball emojis!—ratings function as a useful communicative shorthand, crudely but efficiently reducing a critic’s detailed ruminations to a digestible letter or number. Set against this quant-obsessed backdrop, it’s understandable that Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregation giant which assigns a “score” to every movie that’s meant to convey its percentage of positive appraisals, has grown to dominate contemporary cinematic discourse. But while the site’s cultural ubiquity may be explicable, it’s also unfortunate, because Rotten Tomatoes is fucking awful.
Actually, it’s worse than awful; it’s meaningless. And even worse than meaningless, it’s distortive. Rotten Tomatoes purports to answer a straightforward question (“Hey, is this movie any good?”), yet in the process it misleads viewers and, more crucially, reframes discussions. The lifeblood of criticism is conversation: the dialectical exchange of opinions and the robust expression of ideas. Yet under the dominion of Rotten Tomatoes, the score doesn’t supplement criticism; it replaces it altogether. It has acquired the fearsome power of language, supplanting the very words it claims to summarize. Read More
