We Can Still Trust Rotten Tomatoes, Right? (2024)

Something stinks at Rotten Tomatoes. More than a site for reviewing movies, it’s now a game that studios must play in order to have a successful film. A Rotten Tomatoes score can send a good movie to the can and a bad movie to the Oscars. Now, even at the indie level, if your movie isn’t marketed just the right way, you could be headed for a box office failure.

But it’s more than the system that’s broken. Thanks to an investigative report by Vulture, moviegoers now know that the reviews themselves may be poisoned. Lane Brown and Luke Winkie reported that publicity company Bunker 15 may have been tipping the scales to get small films good Rotten Tomato scores and why it was so important that they do.

Rotten Tomatoes has gone from an independently owned movie review aggregator to one owned by a movie studio and a ticketing website. Not only is their objectivity in question, it’s being subverted by private PR firms like Bunker 15. Rotten Tomatoes is too trusted among the moviegoing public, and movie studios are being forced to take advantage of that trust in order to be successful. Rotten Tomatoes has become such a victim of itself, but is it impossible to trust?

Rotten Tomatoes and the System

When Rotten Tomatoes selects a review to publish, that review is either good or bad. It doesn’t work on a gradient of percentages like some people may think. That score is determined by the total number of reviews averaged as either good or bad opinions. So when someone leaves feedback on a film and says it fails its goal but does so in such a spectacular way that it’s still worth watching, that still counts as a bad review. It’s averaged into a score that might only be composed of a minimum of 5 reviews. Just something to think about the next time you check the website.

When a movie hits Hollywood, its Rotten Tomatoes score becomes an important factor in determining success. When Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania came out, it had a rating of 79%. The movie had the best opening weekend of any film in the Ant-Man series. But after that weekend, the rating slid by more than thirty points, and word quickly got around that Quantumania was one of the less desirable Marvel films. Still, regardless of how good the movie actually was, for three days, it sold plenty of tickets and made enough noise to get people in the theaters.

Getting a high score on the Tomatometer and having a successful movie may just be a simple matter of finding the right way to inflate your numbers a little. The Ant-Man series has tons of reliable fans that are almost guaranteed to come out for opening weekend. If you plan early screenings where those demographics are high, then you’ll no doubt see a biased score on Rotten Tomatoes before your big release date.

Alternatively, when Disney released Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, they did it first at Cannes, one of the most highbrow film events in the world. When it was released back in America, it had a bad Rotten Tomatoes score and did poorly in the theaters. Even though its score eventually improved, the initial gossip over the film hurt its overall performance.

Related: Cate Blanchett’s 15 Best Movies, Ranked by Rotten Tomatoes

Bunker 15

Bunker 15 is a marketing firm that uses its “smart-tech Publicity Engine” to help you find the “right” journalists to help promote your film. In their report, Vulture found several critics who said Bunker 15 had paid them $50 or more per review. Their key example was the 2018 film Ophelia. The early screenings of the film yielded a Rotten Tomatoes score of 46%, and Vulture said one critic had been lobbied by Bunker 15 to change their review. Over the course of four months, that score changed to a certified fresh 62%. A month after that, Ophelia had been successfully sold for distribution in the United States.

Related: The 20 Best Movies With a Low Rotten Tomatoes Score

When they asked Bunker 15’s founder for comment, he said, “We have thousands of writers in our distribution list. A small handful have set up a specific system where filmmakers can sponsor or pay to have them review a film.” So they are paying money for reviews. Rotten Tomatoes says they have a dedicated team that monitors suspicious activity and tries to stop attempts to manipulate scores, but as Vulture has pointed out, the Rotten Tomatoes system is ”erratic, reductive, and easily hacked.”

And it’s not just publicity companies trying to skew numbers illegally; it’s a whole system of choices that need to be made to secure a high score on the Tomatometer. Is Rotten Tomatoes trustworthy? For the most part, yes. The incident made public by Vulture could be very isolated and was for a relatively smaller film. However, Rotten Tomatoes has become unavoidable in making a successful movie, and if you aren’t willing to work the system their way, it could mean a box office flop.