Rotten Tomatoes has unveiled a new rating system for audience scores in an attempt to quell the site’s association with review bombing. Rotten Tomatoes originally introduced the audience score as a way to give film fans a voice on the platform, but the well-intentioned tool has become easily exploited and weaponized by those wanting to make a point about a certain franchise or brand. Various groups often partake in review bombing a movie, coordinating one-star ratings for films they have a personal grievance with.
Many films targeted by review bombing have been those with female leads or large non-white casts, including 2016’s Ghostbusters, Captain Marvel, and Black Panther. The intention of this review bombing is to make people believe that “real” audiences hate a movie despite it not being a real representation of an audience.
Related
The Acolyte Creator Responds to Rotten Tomatoes Review Bombing: ‘It’s Pretty Expected’
The Acolyte creator Leslye Headland has now reacted to the review bombing that has occurred on Rotten Tomatoes and elsewhere.
Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango’s new system looks to put a stop to review-bombing, or at least mitigate some of the damage by segregating genuine reviews from others. The new “Verified Hot” badge will reflect average moviegoers’ views, similar in many ways to Amazon’s badge for reviews from people who have actually bought the item they are reviewing. For a movie to earn the badge, it needs to have a Verified Audience Score of 90% or higher on its Popcornmeter. Only audience reviews from people who have purchased a ticket through sister site Fandango will contribute to this particular metric.
While this seems quite a niche group, according to IndieWire, the goal is to work with other partners so that people who don’t use Fandango can still be considered verified. The first films to receive the Verified Hot badge include Deadpool & Wolverine, Twisters, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Fly Me to the Moon, and It Ends With Us, while the site is retroactively adding the badge to more than 200 films. In addition, two more badges will be added. A “Hot” badge is for anything between 90% and 60%, and a “Stale” badge is for anything under 60%.
Should Rotten Tomatoes Have an Audience Score?
Rotten Tomatoes has tried to squash review bombing before, and this is the latest step. There are some notable flaws in the system, as now Rotten Tomatoes’ parent company, Comcast, requires someone to use their ticketing service, Fandango, to confirm a ticket purchase to be part of this elite focus group. It is not a perfect system by any means, but it does work to prevent mass groups from creating an account purposely to give a negative rating to a movie they have never even seen. While there are some that deny review-bombing exists, the best example was with Star Wars: The Last Jedi, where Business Insider reported that there were multiple cases of bots being used to bring down the film’s audience score.
Related
MCU: A History of Review Bombing and Its Roots in Misogyny
Review bombing on public access sites is growing more rampant, and the MCU is at the center of it for centering women progressively.
Yet, there is an argument to be made about whether Rotten Tomatoes should even have an audience score feature to begin with. In terms of judging audience engagement in a film, there is CinemaScore, Letterboxd, and, of course, the box office itself. Rotten Tomatoes wants to make itself a one-stop destination for everything, but having both critical and audience reviews side by side often does nothing but show a massive rift between the two opinions. Having two separate scores turns films into a battleground and creates a division. Whatever the good intentions behind it, Rotten Tomatoes has more often found itself becoming a tool for haters than for lovers.
