I Origins | Rotten Tomatoes (2024)

FAQs

What does 100 Rotten Tomatoes mean? ›

The percentage is based on the film's reviews aggregated by the website and assessed as positive or negative, and when all aggregated reviews are positive, the film has a 100% rating.

The Audience Score, denoted by a popcorn bucket, represents the percentage of users who have rated a movie or TV show positively.

“As the reviews of a given film accumulate, the Rotten Tomatoes score measures the percentage that are more positive than negative, and assigns an overall fresh or rotten rating to the movie. Scores of over 60 percent are considered fresh, and scores of 59 percent and under are rotten.

The website keeps track of all the reviews counted for each film and calculates the percentage of positive reviews. If the positive reviews make up 60% or more, the film is considered "fresh". If the positive reviews are less than 60%, the film is considered "rotten".

So when a movie such as “Black Panther” gets a certified “fresh” 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, we interpret it as a film that is near perfection, while a film such as last year's “The Emoji Movie” that lands around 9 percent, must be a steaming pile of garbage.

Rotten Tomatoes Rating System

A red tomato score indicating its fresh status, is designated when at least 60% of the reviews are positive. A green splat indicating rotten status, is displayed when less than 60% of the reviews are positive.

Whose movie ratings are more trustworthy, IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes? IMDb's rating are trustworthy in telling you the average rating given to movies by visitors to that website. Rotten Tomatoes ratings are trustworthy in telling you the percentage of film critics who gave movies a positive review.

Rotten Tomatoes, owned by Warner Bros.

The Big Picture. Rotten Tomatoes' main problem is its lack of nuance, sorting movies into good or bad without considering detail or redeeming qualities. Studios have used Rotten Tomatoes to their advantage, manipulating early reactions and scores to boost audience numbers and box office success.

What does the tomato on Peaco*ck mean? ›

Movie thumbnails may include a red-tomato, "fresh" rating but don't display a score if the movie is rated "rotten." You can see the score for any movie with a Rotten Tomatoes rating, alongside the audience score, after selecting it.

A high rating on Rotten Tomatoes is good. The scores range from 0% to 100%, one hundred being the best and zero being the worst. If a movie's score is equal to or above 60%, the movie is considered “fresh”, while if it is below 60% it is considered “rotten”.

The Terror of Tiny Town (1938)

Melvin Defleur referred to it as "Perhaps the worst film of all time", and critic Gabriel Ricard listed it as the worst film ever made; stating, "not only is it pretty terrible, but Tiny Town is also pretty endearing."

On the film review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, films that every surveyed critic considered bad have a 0% rating. As of 2023, only 40 films with 20 reviews have received this rating.

The “Tomatometer Rankings” connects to the practice of viewers throwing rotten tomatoes when disapproving of a poor stage performance; the higher the percentage a movie receives, the more “fresh” it is and, at least theoretically, better in the show business world.

Other recent series with multiple seasons in the 100% club: The Good Place, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, One Day at a Time, Veep, Fleabag, Jane the Virgin, and Feel Good. Only Murders in the Building season 1 has the most reviews on its perfect 100% score.

As the reviews of a given film accumulate, the Rotten Tomatoes score measures the percentage that are more positive than negative, and assigns an overall fresh or rotten rating to the movie. Scores of over 60 percent are considered fresh, and scores of 59 percent and under are rotten.

Because it's “relatively” easy to get a 100% score after that first handful of reviews (five is the minimum count for a movie to get its Tomatometer), every film listed here has at least crossed the Certified Fresh threshold. Then we sorted them by movies with more reviews featured higher up.