Finally, Rotten Tomatoes is making a long-needed change to its website.
Until today, the movie-review aggregator has given films a rating based on the opinions of critics who have actually seen the movie. This unfairly shut out the voice of uninformed people who hadn’t watched the film. Now, at last, Rotten Tomatoes is changing its system so that grades will be determined by people who haven’t seen the movie but already know whether the film will be good or not.
Finally, there is a home for the opinions of people who can see a movie poster and pretty much deduce the whole deal with it!
The old Rotten Tomatoes only took into account the grades of professional film critics, who took 90 minutes or even longer to watch and think about a film before writing a review. Now it’ll be a breeze for people who can watch half a trailer and intuit that Jake Gyllenhaal is just doing this one for the money to have their snap judgments tabulated by Rotten Tomatoes.
Look how easy it was for a reviewer to give their opinion on whether or not Mad Max: Fury Road is good:
Wow, it sounds like this reviewer really has a good gut on whether movies will be worth the time or not! Based on uneducated opinions like that one, Rotten Tomatoes is now listing the film with a decent 63 percent rating. Sounds pretty fair.
Another advantage of this new system is that movies can be reviewed long before they hit theaters, or even long before they’re produced or written. Star Wars: The Last Jedi already has a glowing 95 percent rating, with raving reviews like this one:
Being forced to wait to watch movies when you just want to immediately spout off about them is a real chore, so it’s great that they’re saving reviewers a lot of time. Thank you, Rotten Tomatoes!
