Why Rotten Tomatoes’ ratings overhaul does no one any favours

The review aggregator website is giving increased prominence to ‘audience scores’, with critically panned dreck scooping up top grades. It’s the sign of something bigger and more troubling in our culture, writes Louis Chilton

Ryan Reynolds’s ‘Free Guy’ is one of several films to be given the ‘Verified Hot’ badge (Disney/Rotten Tomatoes)

They don’t build statues of critics.” So read the phrase emblazoned on a pink crop top worn by Katy Perry, in a photo shared to a recent Instagram story. The aphorism was made famous when the same shirt was donned by Charli XCX before a 2022 album launch. And you could see how it would resonate with Perry, whose recent musical relaunch has been met with sneers and disparagement from the wider critical establishment. The implication was simple. In the vein of that old snippy adage that “those who can’t do, teach”, the idea is that criticism itself is merely the worthless recourse of those unable to make resonant and popular art themselves.

It would be easy to pick apart the pop star’s contention. For one, it’s factually inaccurate – visit Champaign, Illinois, and you will find a statue of the late, great film critic Roger Ebert, cast in solid bronze. What’s more, Perry’s recent comeback single “Woman’s World” actually proved just as repellent for listeners as it did for reviewers. (Her shirt could just as easily read: “They don’t build statues of musicians who chart at No 63 on the Billboard Hot 100.”) It’s the sort of sentiment that inevitably smacks of bitterness: you wouldn’t see Charli XCX championing such a slogan right now, when her recent album Brat has been lavished with raves across the board. It’s natural for Perry to want to lash out – it’s a vulnerable feeling, putting any sort of art out into the world, and requires, at this level, a preternaturally thick skin. But it’s an indicator – if a slightly petty one – of a growing and perturbing push to undermine the role of legitimate professional critics. And this can only be a bad thing.

This week, Rotten Tomatoes – the review aggregation website that has become arguably the internet’s most popular resource for laypeople to immediately estimate a film’s artistic worth – announced that it was overhauling its rating system. Originally, the website essentially worked to compile professional critics’ reviews, tallying up the positive and negative write-ups to award it an overall “Rotten” or “Fresh” score, alongside a percentage figure. It was an imperfect system, but one that was broadly useful: if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t assiduously follow the verdicts and predilections of individual film critics – ie, most casual film-watchers – then a blunt percentage score is a quick and easy indicator of whether or not a film is likely to be up your street. Over time, however, disparities began to emerge between the critics’ consensuses and the whims of the moviegoing public. Particularly when it came to mainstream schlock, films that critics disliked would prove stubbornly popular with everyday crowds (Tom Hardy’s slimy antihero flick Venom, for instance, or the tackily anthemic Bohemian Rhapsody). Now, Rotten Tomatoes has codified this into a new rating metric: everyday moviegoers will vote on the merits of a film or TV release, and it will be deemed either “Stale”, “Hot”, or “Verified Hot”, based on the percentage of positive reviews.

It is yet another affirmation of a mentality that has taken hold in our culture: the notion that critics aren’t to be trusted, that they are “out of touch” or perhaps even (a common and largely baseless complaint) “shills”, incentivised to disparage certain studios’ releases at the expense of others. Among the films to have retroactively received the ebullient “Verified Hot” rating are plenty of critical darlings – Dune: Part Two; Oppenheimer – and middling received crowd-pleasers (Ryan Reynolds’ Free Guy) but also a plethora of films that critics deemed “Rotten”: Bob Marley: One Love; 2019’s Aladdin. What, exactly, does this new score system mean, if critically panned films can be recommended among the cream of the crop? And why is such spurious praise even necessary? These films were hits at the box office; they were conceived to make money and be popular among the masses, and they did and were. The introduction of this new system speaks to an insecurity among many mainstream moviegoers. It is not enough to simply like what you like – you must also be morally vindicated for doing it.

This is, I suppose, one of the great misconceptions about film criticism: the idea that critics are somehow judging audiences for liking populist entertainment, that average consumers are being written off as intellectually or culturally lesser. There are, perhaps, critics who think this way – a certain degree of snobbery is inherent to criticism as a craft. But have we really reached the point where any degree of expertise must automatically be considered suspect?

And expertise is essential, if the purpose of criticism is to expand beyond simply, “Should you go and see this thing?”, and towards a bigger picture – matters of significance and posterity. All art exists in a continuum of innovation and iteration; without an expert grounding in what has come before, it is impossible to recognise, and therefore to articulate, what exactly it is you are watching. There’s a now-ancient meme imagining a person whose only moviegoing experience was Alec Baldwin’s The Boss Baby. Watching a second film, they muse: “Getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes from this…” This, in a nutshell, would be criticism without critics.

That’s not to say that anyone cannot have a worthwhile and informed opinion, but Rotten Tomatoes audiences are amorphous and unaccountable – audience reviewers could be 12-year-olds, or incels, or film history professors, and there’s no way of filtering them.

In shifting the influence away from professional critics and towards everyday punters, the only real winners are the big film studios, who are able to augment their already-successful marketing campaigns with further flattery that, yes, you are not only entitled to enjoy our product – but smart and discerning for doing so. It’s also worth noting that the “anyone can have their say” approach to film criticism is a system ripe for abuse and manipulation. As has already happened countless times, online fanbases can mobilise to manipulate a film’s score on, say, Rotten Tomatoes, driving it up or down, for political purposes. “review bombing” is the term for when a release is targeted with a spate of negative reviews to intentionally drive down its aggregate score; typically, this has happened when right-wing audiences object to the prominence of a minority character. (This isn’t a trend unique to film criticism – Goodreads suffers similar issues in the literary world.)

I do not mean to gatekeep the act of criticism; in recent years, there have been plenty of examples of superlative cultural criticism coming from non-traditional sources – YouTubers and amateur writers on the film diary/social media website Letterboxd. But there has to be an understanding of why critics are important, and why the practice should be protected as a craft. Otherwise, it’s all just playing into the hands of the moneymen: if everybody’s a critic, criticism itself will get lost in the noise.