Rotten Tomatoes profile.
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| URL | Rottentomatoes.com |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Film review aggregator and forum |
| Registration | Optional |
| Owner | Flixster (since January 2010)[ |
| Created by | Senh Duong |
| Launched | 1999 |
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films, most widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance.
The website's current editor-in-chief is Matt Atchity.
History
Rotten Tomatoes was launched on August 19, 1999 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 US."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 launch; it attracted "600 - 1000 daily unique visitors" as a result.
Duong teamed up with University of California, Berkeley classmates Patrick Lee and Stephen Wang, his former partners at the Berkeley, California-based web design firm Design Reactor to pursue Rotten Tomatoes on a full-time basis, officially launching on April 1, 2000.
In June 2004, IGN Entertainment acquired Rottentomatoes.com for an undisclosed sum. In September 2005, IGN was bought by News Corp's Fox Interactive Media. In January 2010 IGN sold the website to Flixster, which produces the most popular movie ratings app for the iPhone and other mobile devices. The combined reach of both companies is 30 million unique visitors a month across all different platforms, according to the companies.
Rotten Tomatoes users can create and join groups that allow them to discuss different aspects of film, and even one group called "The Golden Oyster Awards" has its members vote for their winners of different awards, much like the Oscars or Golden Globes.
Description
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 splattered tomato). At the end of the year one film will receive the "Golden Tomato", meaning it is the highest rating film that year.
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, and Lisa Schwarzbaum, 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.
A Certified Fresh logo.
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.
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 0-10 (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".
In January 2010, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the New York Film Critics Circle, Armond White, its chairman, cited Rotten Tomatoes in particular and film review aggregators in general, as examples of how "the Internet takes revenge on individual expression" by "dumping reviewers onto one website and assigning spurious percentage-enthusiasm points to the discrete reviews"; according to White, such websites "offer consensus as a substitute for assessment."
The way the website reviews films has been subject to criticism for focusing on judging films on the amount of scores they receive as positive instead of the review scores themselves, making the real opinion of the reviewers hard to understand without looking at a reviewers score. This means that if a film receives a only handful of reviews and all of them are average a film can score an easy 100% or any score above 90%. Examples of this include Tokyo Gore Police and Borderland.
Correlation with box office revenue
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.
"Fresh"/"Rotten" extremes
There are several films that have received a 100% freshness rating with fewer reviews including Melvin and Howard, The Last Picture Show, The Miracle Worker, Chinatown, Aliens, A Hard Day's Night, Toy Story, Toy Story 2, King Kong, Cool Hand Luke, The Evil Dead, The Third Man, The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, Anatomy of a Murder, 12 Angry Men, Witness for the Prosecution, The 400 Blows, Stalker, M, The Red Balloon, The Wizard of Oz, The Terminator, The Grapes of Wrath, Before Sunrise, Dr. Strangelove, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, On the Waterfront, All About Eve, City Lights, Modern Times, The Gold Rush, The Great Dictator, The Kid, Sherlock, Jr., How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, A Shot in the Dark, Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, North by Northwest, Seven Samurai, Rashōmon, Ikiru, The Hidden Fortress, Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, Pinocchio, Rear Window, Suspicion, All the President's Men, Le Samourai, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Them!, Jaws, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Man on Wire, Mary Poppins, Sweet Smell of Success, Stagecoach, The King and I, Rebecca, Shadow of a Doubt, Murder on the Orient Express, Das Boot, Scarface: The Shame of the Nation, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Wrong Trousers, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Roger & Me, Woodstock, Bob Roberts, Say Anything..., The Heiress, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Mark of Zorro, The Killer, Batman: Under the Red Hood, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Endless Summer, Mad Max 2, Shoot to Kill, Days of Wine and Roses, My Life as a Dog, and the documentary American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein.
There are over 200 films that have so far received a 0% freshness rating, including such as universally panned films as Witless Protection, A Troll in Central Park, One Missed Call, Death Wish 3, Jaws: The Revenge, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, King Kong Lives, I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, Manos: The Hands of Fate and The Silence of the Hams. The site includes a list of the "Worst of the Worst."
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 and written by Mark Ganek. The show airs every Thursday at 10:30 EST on the Current TV network.Depending on when an episode is filmed and originally aired, ratings of movies might differ from ratings currently found on the website. The last episode aired on September 16, 2010, although it will return as a much shorter segment of infoMania (TV series).
(source:wikipedia)
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