Rotten Tomatoes is a
website devoted to reviews, information, and news of
films. The name derives from the historical
cliché of throwing
tomatoes and other
produce at
stage performers if a performance was particularly bad.
History
Rotten Tomatoes was launched on August 19, 1998 as a spare time
project by
Senh Duong. His goal
in creating Rotten Tomatoes was "to create a site where people can
get access to reviews from a variety of critics in the U. S." His
inspiration came when, as a fan of
Jackie
Chan, Duong started collecting all the reviews of Chan's movies
as they were coming out in the United States. The first movie
reviewed on Rotten Tomatoes was
Your Friends &
Neighbors. The website was an immediate success, receiving
mentions by Yahoo!, Netscape, and USA Today within the first week
of its launching; it attracted "600 - 1000 daily unique visitors"
as a result.
Duong
teamed up with Patrick Lee and Stephen Wang, his former partners at the
Berkeley
, California
-based web design firm Design Reactor to pursue Rotten Tomatoes as a
full-time start-up company, officially launching on April 1,
1999.
In June 2004,
IGN Entertainment acquired
Rottentomatoes.com for an undisclosed sum. In September 2005,
IGN was bought out by
News
Corp's
Fox Interactive
Media.
The site has some of the most heavy traffic on the Internet,
ranking in the top 1,000 websites visited according to
Alexa Internet. The current Editor in Chief
is Matt Atchity and the Vice President and General Manager is
Shannon Ludovissy.
Description
A
Certified Fresh logo
Rotten Tomatoes includes online reviews from authors that
are certified members of various writing guilds or film critic
associations. The staff then determine for each review whether it
is positive ("fresh", marked by a small icon of a red tomato) or
negative ("rotten", marked by a small icon of a green splatted
tomato).
The website keeps track of all of the reviews counted (which can
approach 270 for major, recently released films) and the percentage
of positive reviews is tabulated. If the positive reviews make up
60% or more, the film is considered "fresh" in that a
supermajority of the reviewers approve of the
film. If the positive reviews are less than 60%, then the film is
considered "rotten." In addition, major film reviewers like
Roger Ebert,
Desson Thomson/
Stephen Hunter (
Washington Post), and Lisa Schwarzbaum
(
Entertainment
Weekly), are listed in a sub-listing called "Top Critics",
which tabulates their reviews separately, while still including
their opinions in the general rating. When there are sufficient
reviews to form a conclusion, a consensus statement is posted which
is intended to articulate the general reasons for the opinion. The
ratings favor recent releases and films with large numbers of
reviews over older films, due to the scarcity of archived reviews
for such older films.
This rating in turn is marked with an equivalent icon when the film
is listed, giving the reader a one glance look at the general
critical opinion about the work. Movies with a Tomatometer of 75%
or better and at least 40 reviews from Tomatometer Critics
(including 5 Top Critics) receive the "Certified Fresh" seal. As a
result of the requirements for quantity of ratings, there may be
films with 100% positive ratings which don't have the certificate
due to insufficient reviews to be sure of the freshness.
There are several films that have received a 100% freshness rating
with fewer reviews including
Toy
Story,
Toy Story 2,
The Evil Dead,
The Wizard of Oz,
The Terminator,
Before Sunrise,
Dr. Strangelove,
The Godfather,
All About Eve,
Alice Doesn't Live Here
Anymore,
Pinocchio,
Rear Window,
Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs,
Jaws,
Triumph of the Will,
Man on Wire,
Mary Poppins,
Zulu, and
The Killer, and there are over
200 films that have so far received a 0% freshness rating such as
universally panned films like
Witless
Protection,
One Missed
Call, and
Superbabies:
Baby Geniuses 2. The site has recently included a
page of the "100 Worst Reviewed Films of All
time."
In addition to reviews, Rotten Tomatoes hosts
message forums, where thousands of
participants take part in the discussion of movies, video games,
music and other topics. In addition, users are able to rate and
review films themselves. Every movie also features a "user average"
that calculates the percentage of users that have rated the film
positively in a manner similar to how the critics' reviews are
calculated. However, this score is more specific as the users are
able to rate the movie on a scale of 1-10 (compared to critic
reviews, which usually use 4-star ratings and are often simply
qualitative). Like the critic's reviews, a score of 6 or higher is
considered "fresh".
Rotten Tomatoes review their films by taking all other critic
reviews and then collating them together on one website.
Correlation with profits
According to a non-scientific study by
Erik Lundegaard, films released in 2007
which are scored "fresh" make, on average, $1000 more per screen
than films which are scored as "rotten".
Another study by USA Today in 2003, unrelated to Rotten Tomatoes,
also produced similar results: "the better the reviews, the higher
the box office". The newspaper found that, contrary to popular
belief, film critics and moviegoers agree more often than
not.
International
Localised
versions of the site are available in the UK
and Australia.
Readers accessing Rotten Tomatoes from France and Germany are
automatically redirected to the UK version of the site that
provides local release dates, cinema listings, box office results
and promotes reviews from UK critics. There is currently no way for
these users to view the US version of the site, other than via
tunneling or through the use of a
suitable
proxy server.
The localized versions
of the site contain all of the US editorial content, reviews and
film lists and are augmented by local content maintained by editors
based in London
and Sydney
.
The Rotten Tomatoes Show
In early 2009,
Current Television
launched the televised version of the web review site,
The
Rotten Tomatoes Show which is hosted by Brett Erlich and Ellen
Fox. The writer of the show is Mark Ganek. The show appears every
Thursday at 10:30 Eastern and Pacific Time on the Current TV
network. However it re-runs itself on occasion.
References
External links
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Misc
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