How Does Rotten Tomatoes Really Work? You Might be Using it Wrong!

So many times we hear of movies getting a very high rating or a very low one. For example, it is very common to hear a movie like Lady Bird got a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and this might encourage us to go and see the movie. But what does this really mean? Is this movie really a masterpiece? It might be or it might be not!

This is a web site where both critics and users give a score to a movie. Critics' scores determine if a movie gets a "Rotten" label or a "Fresh" label. If 60% of the critics of a movie received good reviews the movie will be label "fresh", but if the movie didn't reach the 60% score, it will be labeled as "rotten".

There is even a higher score for those movies which are remarkably better than others, we are talking about the "Certified Fresh" label. This one is a label for those movies which keep 75% of good reviews or more.

It is important then to understand that this metric, called by the way the "Tomatometer" does not rate how good a movie is - besides movies are all about perspective! The Tomatomer indicates only the porcentage of good reviews, and not all of those reviews are not necessarily remarkable reviews.

If you are using Rotten Tomatoes as guidance to decide if you'd like to go to the movie theater and go watch a movie or not, you might like to pay attention to the Avarage Rating, which gives a more realistic aproach on how good or bad a movie is. Its name speaks for itself: this is just the avarage rating from Rotten Tomatoes users and is a very balanced metric.

Rotten Tomatoes has become a very common tool for us to inform ourselves about movies, but be careful on how you use it. Even when a movies is, for example, certified fresh, does not mean is a master piece. The new Ghostobusters movie with the female cast reached that score and is a piece of trash for most of people. Or take the new Netflix original Bright, which has divided users and critics.

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