Three Ways | Rotten Tomatoes (2024)

FAQs

What does 57 Rotten Tomatoes mean? ›

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.

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".

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.

Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score

The Audience Score is designated by a popcorn bucket. The score is the percentage of users who have rated the movie or show positively.

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.

The average Rotten Tomatoes user will see a 97 percent score as nearly a masterpiece. “It has to be good,” they might say, or commercials will tell them, “It's the best-reviewed movie of the year!”

Only the greatest and most renowned cinematic masterpieces (or at least those with a large enough amount of reviews) are awarded a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, with few films receiving the prestigious honor.

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.

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. This means every last review from critics was positive.

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.

Is 99% Rotten Tomatoes good or bad? ›

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.

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.

Rotten Tomatoes, owned by Warner Bros.

Whose movie ratings are more trustworthy, IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes? IMDb's rating are trustworthy in telling you the average rating given to movies by visitors to that website. Rotten Tomatoes ratings are trustworthy in telling you the percentage of film critics who gave movies a positive review.

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.

Here, “close” means a movie that was in striking distance of being marked Fresh on the Tomatometer. A 60% score is what you need to be Fresh, and all the movies featured in this list are exactly one percentage point away: They are the members of The 59% Club.

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.