Several times we see Hollywood films getting a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Recently, David Fincher’s The Killer got the killer score and so did many big films like Mission Impossible 7 and Barbie.
But the latest accusation is big enough for us to assume that they might be a farce.
There is a PR agency in Hollywood called Bunker 15. Unlike most companies that target top publication critics, they prefer a bottom-up strategy, enlisting lesser-known, often self-published reviewers who are nonetheless included in Rotten Tomatoes’ tracking pool. In a departure from the norm, Bunker 15 reportedly compensates these critics with payments of $50 or more per review. It’s worth noting that such payments are usually undisclosed, and Rotten Tomatoes explicitly forbids reviews influenced by financial benefits.
When critics asked what if the film deserved negative reviews the Bunker 15 employee said that some very nice critics, more of them than expected, agreed not to post bad reviews on their usual websites. Instead, they would write these negative reviews on smaller blogs that Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t pay attention to. This way, they could make sure Rotten Tomatoes only saw the positive reviews.
Rotten Tomatoes is well-known, but it has a pretty basic way of calculating scores. They look at each review and decide if it’s positive or negative. Then, they add up the positive ones and divide by the total number of reviews. That’s how they get the score. It doesn’t matter if a review is from a big newspaper or a small blog.
Also, Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t consider how much a reviewer liked or disliked a movie. So, a movie could get a perfect score even if most reviewers just thought it was okay.
Rotten Tomatoes is still considered a very reputable website. If such allegations keep on coming then it would ruin the reputation of the website just like IMDb.
It is high time the company changes its math.
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