Its a credit to Rotten Tomatoes’ (owned by NBC Universal and Warner Bros) marketing that so many associate their user score as in anyway relative to audience reactions. Even setting aside the lousy 1-10 rating system it is and has and will always be easily gamed by bad actors. The truth is there’s no perfect or even ideal way to measure audience reception to a film and what we have doesn’t take into account things like marketing or is the film being advertised to the audiences it’s made for?

Can you even identify who makes up said audiences? I worked for a test screening agency some years ago. We would be instructed to select people for both the screening and the 10 person focus group afterwards based on the client’s orders which were often few to no black or brown people, no ESL, few to no disabled people. That is, they were testing the films against an currated audience (white, able bodied) they assumed were also rushing the box office. Same as anything else, just a handful of people elect themselves to be tastemakers for pop culture and an outfit like Rotten Tomatoes knows how sexy that feels. So they drive user engagement by offering user scores that by association (really just being next to the critical score) have an air of respectability.

Bull shit. If for any reason you need a nonsense metric to gauge the cinematic winds just use Cinemascore. Nearly twice as old as RT, the Cinemascore is based entirely off asking audiences what letter grade they’d give a film upon exiting a screening opening weekend. The letter grade is also shit, but its more familiar to (american) moviegoers. Everyone knows that anything below a B grade is basically skirting by and since most people think of entertainment in binary terms of “good or bad” the Cinemascore for most films is an A or A+! So common is this that studios consider anything below an A to be a dud! And there have only ever been 21 F grades. Do you know how many movies there are?? Me neither, but its a lot more than than the legal drinking age.

And if that isn’t good enough for you there’s always my back up plan: watch more movies. More genres, from different countries, and different lengths. Don’t know where to start? Ask! Ultimately, only you know what the fuck you actually like in movies and the more you explore the more you’ll realize you don’t need to rely on the wisdom of the crowd.