Anya Taylor-Joy | Rotten Tomatoes (2024)

FAQs

What does it mean to be 100% on Rotten Tomatoes? ›

Welcome to the 100% Club, where every movie isn't necessarily perfect, but their Tomatometers are. A place where all the critic reviews are Fresh, as far as the eye can see, without a Rotten mark to disrupt all the 1s and their attendant 0s in the percentage scores.

A number of these films also appear on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies lists, but there are many others and several entries with dozens of positive reviews, which are considered surprising to some experts. To date, Leave No Trace holds the site's record, with a rating of 100% and 252 positive reviews.

Fresh red tomato. When at least 60% of reviews for a movie or TV show are positive, a red tomato is displayed to indicate its Fresh status. Green splat tomato. When less than 60% of reviews for a movie or TV show are positive, a green splat is displayed to indicate its Rotten status.

Rotten Tomatoes is a website dedicated to reviews, information, and news of movies and television series. The name derives from the vaudeville-era cliché of throwing tomatoes and other products at stage performers if a performance was particularly bad.

So when a movie such as “Black Panther” gets a certified “fresh” 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, we interpret it as a film that is near perfection, while a film such as last year's “The Emoji Movie” that lands around 9 percent, must be a steaming pile of garbage.

The 99% Club: An Ode to the Almost-Perfect Movie

The 99% Club: You'll find it, way past 98% on the Tomatometer, but just before 100%. Inside, a coterie of cinema's practically-finest, movies promising an experience beyond most others – movies that are almost perfect.

On the film review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, films that every surveyed critic considered bad have a 0% rating. As of 2023, only 40 films with 20 reviews have received this rating.

As the reviews of a given film accumulate, the Rotten Tomatoes score measures the percentage that are more positive than negative, and assigns an overall fresh or rotten rating to the movie. Scores of over 60 percent are considered fresh, and scores of 59 percent and under are rotten.

The longest film ever made, according to Guinness World Records, is "The Cure for Insomnia" (1987), directed by John Henry Timmis IV.

In 2011, Warner Bros. acquired Rotten Tomatoes.

What does popcorn mean for movies? ›

There is also a section for Verified Ratings which includes those that have actually bought tickets. To receive a full popcorn bucket, at least 60% of users give a film or show a star rating of 3.5 or higher. A tipped over popcorn bucket indicates that less than 60% of users have given it a 3.5 or higher.

A red tomato means the movie received positive reviews. A splattered green tomato means the movies has been negatively reviewed. The popcorn images are from Flixster, the full popcorn container means the audience generally liked the movie. The spilled popcorn container means audiences didn't find the movie appealing.

Rotten Tomatoes was created by Senh Duong as a hobby.

The Big Picture. Rotten Tomatoes' main problem is its lack of nuance, sorting movies into good or bad without considering detail or redeeming qualities. Studios have used Rotten Tomatoes to their advantage, manipulating early reactions and scores to boost audience numbers and box office success.

The scoring system of Rotten Tomatoes is heavily biased due to genre bias, selection bias, time bias, and recency bias.

The website keeps track of all the reviews counted for each film and calculates the percentage of positive reviews. If the positive reviews make up 60% or more, the film is considered "fresh". If the positive reviews are less than 60%, the film is considered "rotten".

If 60% of reviews are positive, the movie is given a “Fresh” status, but if positive reviews fall below that benchmark, it is deemed “Rotten.” A popular piece of media will typically fall between the 70-90% range, but rarely, a project will receive a 100% score.

A Rotten Tomatoes “Certified Fresh” rating is 60% or higher. The 60% means that 60% of critics liked the movie. It does not necessarily mean that the movie was great. By Rotten Tomatoes' standards, a good rating would be considered a 3/5 or above (3.5 to be safe) as scored in someone's review.