Rotten Tomatoes

• 1. Introduction

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  Rotten Tomatoes launched on the 12th of August 1998, not as a media venture, but as a spare-time project built by a single Berkeley undergraduate named Senh Duong. He had been collecting reviews of Jackie Chan's Hong Kong action films as they arrived in the United States, and he wanted one place where anyone could find them. The catalyst was Rush Hour, Chan's first major Hollywood crossover, which was supposed to open in August 1998. Duong coded the site in two weeks and put it live that same month. The film's release slipped to September. The website stayed.

  What began as a fan's archive would become something Hollywood feared. Within its first week, the site earned mentions from Netscape, Yahoo!, and USA Today. It drew between 600 and 1,000 daily unique visitors. A decade later, nearly a third of adult moviegoers in the United States said they consulted it before buying a ticket.

  How did a student project named after rotten produce become a number that studios blame for killing blockbusters? And is that reputation deserved?

• 2. A Name and Its Origins

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  The phrase "rotten tomatoes" carries a long theatrical tradition: audiences once hurled the fruit at performers they despised. Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang did not reach for that cultural memory directly. Their specific inspiration came from an equivalent scene in the 1992 Canadian film Léolo, a detail that places the site's founding mythology inside an art-house work most Americans have never seen.

  Duong had worked with Lee and Wang at Design Reactor, a web design firm based in Berkeley, California. When Rotten Tomatoes expanded from a side project into a full-time operation, those three former colleagues incorporated as a company and relaunched it officially on the 1st of April 2000. The first non-Chan Hollywood film whose reviews appeared on the site was Your Friends and Neighbors, released in 1998. Its inclusion signaled that the site intended to grow beyond any single star's fanbase.

  The name stuck because it already meant something to audiences. It gestured at the physical, democratic tradition of public disapproval, even as the site was building something more systematic.

• 3. How the Score Works

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  The Tomatometer does not average scores. It counts what percentage of reviews are positive. A critic marks a review either "fresh" or "rotten"; films with 60 percent or more fresh reviews earn the fresh designation, while anything below that threshold earns rotten. This binary sorting is the core of every major criticism the site has attracted.

  The threshold for displaying a Tomatometer score at all depends on projected box office. Films forecast to gross more than $120 million in the United States must receive 40 critic reviews before a score appears. Films expected to make $60 million or more need 20 reviews. Everything else, or any film without a projection, needs only 10. This tiered system means the largest releases face the most scrutiny before a number goes public.

  The "Certified Fresh" seal sits above the basic fresh designation. Earning it requires a Tomatometer of 75 percent or better, at least 80 reviews from certified critics, and at least 5 of those from Top Critics. Limited release films need only 40 reviews. Once a film earns the seal, it keeps it unless its score drops and holds consistently below 70 percent. An average score on a zero-to-ten scale existed from 2003 until April 2025, when it was removed.

  Top Critics, a named tier that includes figures such as Roger Ebert, Owen Gleiberman, and Peter Travers, have their opinions calculated separately and also folded into the general rating. When enough reviews accumulate, staff write a Critics Consensus statement to capture the collective reasoning behind the score.

• 4. Audience Scores and Verification

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  Alongside the critic Tomatometer, each film carries a separate audience score, which the site rebranded the Popcornmeter on the 21st of August 2024. The Popcornmeter measures the percentage of registered users who rated a film positively on a five-star scale. Films scoring 90 percent or above from verified ticket buyers earn a "Verified Hot" badge, which was installed retroactively on more than 200 films upon its launch.

  The verification requirement itself arrived on the 24th of May 2019. Before that date, any registered user could submit a rating. After it, users wishing their score to count toward the Popcornmeter must verify their ticket purchase through Fandango, which owns Rotten Tomatoes. Users can still leave reviews without verifying, but those reviews do not affect the displayed audience score.

  The 2019 change came after a wave of coordinated "bombing," where groups organized online to flood films with negative audience reviews before those films opened. Captain Marvel and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker were among the most notable targets. The site responded by stopping the acceptance of user reviews entirely until a film is publicly released, and changed the "Want to See" statistic to a raw number rather than a percentage so audiences could not mistake it for the audience score.

  Thresholds for displaying a Popcornmeter score mirror the critic side: films projected to gross over $120 million need 500 audience reviews before a score appears; those projected above $60 million need 300; those above $5 million need 100; and smaller films need only 50.

• 5. The "Rotten Tomatoes Effect"

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  In 2017, three summer blockbusters arrived with expectations that did not survive their opening weekends. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales was projected to open at $90 million but earned $62.6 million. Baywatch projected $50 million and made $23.1 million. The Mummy projected $45 million and took in $31.6 million. Rotten Tomatoes scores of 30 percent, 19 percent, and 16 percent respectively preceded each underperformance, and studios pointed at the site as a cause.

  That same summer undercut the argument. Wonder Woman and Spider-Man: Homecoming both scored 92 percent and both opened at or above their $100 million-plus projections. The correlation ran in both directions.

  Well before 2017, 20th Century Fox had commissioned a study in 2015 titled "Rotten Tomatoes and Box Office." It warned that the site combined with social media represented an "increasingly serious complication for the film business," noting that Millennials and even Gen X-ers vet purchases online as habit. Other studies found that 7 out of 10 people said they would be less interested in seeing a film if its Rotten Tomatoes score fell below 25 percent, and that the site carries the most influence over people aged 25 and younger.

  The response from outside the studios was less sympathetic. An independent film distributor marketing executive stated plainly that the argument blaming Rotten Tomatoes was "ridiculous" and that the solution was to make a good movie. Paul Dergarabedian of ComScore offered the same view. Academic researchers, for their part, have so far not found evidence that Rotten Tomatoes ratings actually affect box office performance.

• 6. Studio Countermoves

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  Some studios responded to the site's influence by limiting or delaying access for critics. In July 2017, Sony embargoed critic reviews for The Emoji Movie until the Thursday before its release. The film received a 9 percent rating, including 0 percent after its first 25 reviews, yet still opened to $24 million, in line with projections. Sony's Josh Greenstein, President of Worldwide Marketing and Distribution, argued that the film was made for audiences under 18 and that no other wide release with a score below 8 percent had previously opened above $20 million.

  Warner Bros. tried the same strategy with The House and declined to hold critic pre-screenings. The film held a 16 percent score until its release date and opened to $8.7 million, the lowest debut of Will Ferrell's career.

  Roger Ebert was a vocal opponent of review embargoes. He regularly condemned such moves using what he called "The Wagging Finger of Shame" on At the Movies. His broader criticism carried weight: withholding reviews can signal to the public that the film is of poor quality before any review appears, producing the exact outcome the studio hoped to avoid.

  In April 2024, The Hollywood Reporter reported a downstream consequence of the site's influence in the hiring market. A director's representative described the shift: "Critical acclaim is now gamified. The Rotten Tomatoes score is the first thing people look at when I go pitch a director. It inevitably affects decision-making around hiring a director."

• 7. Critics of the Critics

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  In January 2010, on the 75th anniversary of the New York Film Critics Circle, its chairman Armond White named Rotten Tomatoes as an example of how "the Internet takes revenge on individual expression." He accused the site of assigning "spurious percentage-enthusiasm points to the discrete reviews" and offering "consensus as a substitute for assessment." Landon Palmer, a film and media historian and assistant professor at the University of Alabama, supported White's position, calling the site's algorithm "problematic" when applied to media art.

  Director Brett Ratner criticized the practice of reducing hundreds of reviews into a single popularized number while maintaining respect for individual critics. Writer Max Landis, whose film Victor Frankenstein received a 24 percent rating, argued that reducing criticism to a yes-or-no binary was "destructive" and "arbitrary."

  Martin Scorsese wrote a column in The Hollywood Reporter criticizing both Rotten Tomatoes and CinemaScore for pushing the idea that films like Mother! had to be "instantly liked" to be considered successful. Later, at a dedication for the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies at the University of Illinois, Scorsese argued that review aggregators "devalue cinema on streaming platforms to the level of content."

  In 2015, Meryl Streep, while promoting Suffragette, which carried a 73 percent rating on the site, accused Rotten Tomatoes of overrepresenting male critics. She argued that a score skewed toward one set of tastes could adversely affect the commercial performance of female-driven films. Her comments drew pushback from critics who questioned whether gender or ethnic background should determine a person's response to art.

• 8. Ownership and Reach

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  From Duong's Berkeley apartment to the center of Hollywood's anxiety, the site changed hands several times. IGN Entertainment acquired it in June 2004 for an undisclosed sum. In September 2005, News Corp's Fox Interactive Media bought IGN. In January 2010, Flixster acquired the site from IGN; the combined reach of the two companies at that point was 30 million unique visitors a month. Warner Bros. bought the whole operation in 2011.

  In February 2016, both Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster were sold to Fandango Media, then part of Comcast. Warner Bros. retained a minority stake. In December 2016, Fandango and its websites relocated to Fox Interactive Media's former headquarters in Beverly Hills, California.

  By 2018, a survey found that almost a third of United States adult moviegoers consulted the site before going to the cinema. The scores appear automatically in Google search results for reviewed films and are displayed prominently on Fandango's ticketing platform, on its mobile app, and on streaming services including Peacock. A Vulture investigation published in September 2023 found that publicity company Bunker 15 had boosted scores by recruiting obscure, often self-published reviewers, using the 2018 film Ophelia as an example. Rotten Tomatoes responded by delisting several Bunker 15 films and issued a statement that it does not tolerate manipulation attempts and maintains a dedicated monitoring team. That the site scores now influence director hiring discussions in pitch meetings, as reported in April 2024, suggests the number Duong coded into existence in two weeks has acquired a weight its creator could not have anticipated.