Before I being this article, I want to acknowledge that it is bias of me, being the one who writes most of the movie reviews for The Tiger, to be stating that filmmakers should read the reviews written by critics instead of just looking at the Rotten Tomatoes score. Obviously I want as many people as possible to read what is essentially a facebook rant about the lasted movie I have seen, however I also believe that it is important for moviegoers to read an assortment of different reviews for movies. I believe this because Rotten Tomatoes is what many moviegoers use (including myself at times) to judge the quality of a movie before we have seen it or know anything about it that we did not already learn from the trailer.
All that Rotten Tomatoes does is give the percentage of critics who gave the movie a positive review. It does not take the average of the score that each review gave it. So if a critic gave a movie a score of 2.5/5, that would count as a negative review and would contribute to decreasing the percentage of critics that liked it. Therefore, if you as a moviegoer were simply to see the Rotten Tomatoes score of a movie, you would not know what aspects of the movie that made it bad, or even some of the aspects that made it good. A good example of why you should read reviews is with the new Venom movie. In the review that I wrote for The Tiger, I gave Venom a ⅖ stars because I thought it was an overall forgettable and wasted movie. However, I also stated that Tom Hardy was the best part of the movie and that his scenes, though sometimes marred by other aspects of the movie, were ultimately pretty fun. Depending on what you’re interested in within a movie, that could have influenced you to have seen Venom.By simply looking at the Rotten Tomatoes score you may be missing out on something that you would actually enjoy by avoiding reading the actual criticism of a film.
In addition to reading the actual reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, it is important when looking at Rotten Tomatoes that you should see how many critics actually reviewed a film. My favorite example of this is the movie Gator, a movie starring Burt Reynolds and that many of you will be familiar with thanks to the show Archer. I am also a fan of Gator (and really any movie starring Burt Reynolds) yet Gator has a )% on Rotten Tomatoes. Usually it’s a safe bet to say that a movie with a 0% on RT is actually pretty bad, one should take a closer look at both the reviews and the number of critics who saw it. Gator has only five critic reviews for it on the Rotten Tomatoes website. That doesn’t seem like nearly the amount of critics to give a film a 0%. However, my disagreements with Rotten Tomatoes on this movie also doesn’t mean that Gator, or any other movie with which I disagree upon the Rotten Tomatoes is good or bad. That’s why I believe it is so important to first read the actual movie reviews for a film, especially if you have a desire to see it. Then if you still have a desire to see it despite some bad reviews, by all means you should see it! Just because it has a low RT score and the critics had nothing good to say about it doesn’t mean that you should not see it. You may in fact like it! And unless the movie is Pirates of the Caribbean 5, there’s nothing wrong with you liking a bad movie. In fact, there are a lot of movies that are not only guilt-pleasure bad movies, there are movies that are in fact great that Rotten Tomatoes has happened to have given a poor score.
Rotten Tomatoes has allowed moviegoers to become lazy before seeing a movie. Movie critics aren’t there to be apart of a averaging system to let you know how a movie should be graded. They are interned to let you know how they personally felt about a movie and which strengths and weaknesses a movie may have had. By only focusing on a percentage that some website gives a movie, take the time to read why specifically a movie may work or not work. And if you do find yourself in a rush and want to see how a movie is rated based on a percentage, check out Metacritic. It gives the average of all the scores given by a movie, which I believe paints a more accurate picture of the quality of a movie.
