Movie ratings on Rotten Tomatoes are often featured on trailers and blamed for box office failures. While it’s true that peer reviews increasingly drive consumer behavior, a look at box office data reveals that reviews are only one of many factors that contribute to a film’s success.
Aggregate scores on Rotten Tomatoes determine whether the film is “fresh” or “rotten.” Anything over 60 percent is considered “fresh,” anything under 60 is “rotten” and 75 percent or above gets the coveted “Certified Fresh” seal of approval you see in movie trailers.
Rotten Tomatoes, along with other aggregate movie rating sites, compile review scores so that consumers can get an overview of its reception on one site. A recent study by National Research Group found that 36 percent of US moviegoers check Rotten Tomatoes before seeing a film and seven out of ten would be less likely to see a film if the score was less than 25 percent.
Over the past year, many have speculated whether “The Rotten Tomatoes Effect” is a myth or movie killer, especially when a low score on the site corresponds with low box office revenue.
“There are a lot of factors that go into [the success of a film], not just reviews,” Karie Bible, box office analyst and film historian at Exhibitor Relations, told AListDaily. “For example, the IT movie. That got 85 percent on Rotten Tomatoes—that’s really good, but Warner Bros. did a fantastic, very long lead marketing campaign on that film.
“IT has made $327.3 million dollars to date. The film did well, but not just because it had good reviews—it was a great concept [and it] had been 20 years since the TV series,” said Bible. “It wasn’t something we’d seen a bazillion times before and there’s probably a whole generation that doesn’t know about the TV series necessarily. It has a great marketing campaign. There are so many reasons it was a hit other than good reviews, although they certainly helped.”
Massive marketing pushes have always played a role in getting audiences into the theater, but a lack of marketing can have the opposite effect. Geostorm, the big-budget disaster film starring Gerard Butler, received very little promotion prior to its release in October—rather unusual for a Warner Bros. film. Screenings of Geostorm also did not allow press, which aroused suspicion that the studio didn’t have much faith in its success. The film currently sits at 13 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and $207.6 million worldwide.
Timing is another factor to consider when releasing a film, which—if we’re being honest—was an unfortunate challenge for Geostorm, which came out amid real-life natural disasters. Whether the film was worth seeing in the first place is up to audience’s opinion, but even the best disaster film would suffer under such circumstances.
Competing films is another consideration. Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens this weekend, but unlike The Force Awakens, it will compete with other family-friendly movies like Jumanji, Justice League, Coco and Wonder. That’s not to say fans won’t come out in droves to see the long-awaited sequel, but competition will certainly play a role in ticket sales.
“People want really hard and fast rules, and it doesn’t work that way,” said Bible. “Screenwriter William Goldman once said that ‘no one really knows anything in Hollywood.’ In a lot of ways that’s true because what is a rule one day isn’t necessarily going to be a rule tomorrow. Sometimes a movie will get glowing reviews and it will have a good opening, and sometimes it can have all the great reviews in the world and that doesn’t mean it’s going to make money.”
For example, Lady Bird was the best-reviewed title on Rotten Tomatoes that, until recently, maintained a 100 percent score from 196 reviews. Despite critical praise, Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut has fetched a modest $22 million at the box office to date.
In contrast, The Mummy reboot earned $31.6 million during its opening weekend in the US, despite a score of 16 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The film has earned over $409 million worldwide, most of which originates from audiences overseas. However, The Mummy’s overall performance has Universal rethinking its Dark Universe franchise plans.
We now live in a connected society where peer reviews greatly influence consumer behavior. Rotten Tomatoes may not hold all the cards to a film’s success, but when the company withheld its score for Justice League until the day of its release, some worried that the move could spark a new trend that holds film criticism hostage.
Former film critic and Doctor Strange co-writer C. Robert Cargill is concerned that if moviegoers buy tickets to a bad movie because they couldn’t see reviews ahead of time, smaller filmmakers will suffer the consequences.
“Fortunes are being made and lost at the hands of these united, aggregated critics,” Cargill wrote on IndieWire. “What happens when your [scrappy little] film gets annihilated by a juggernaut of a stinker that would have been otherwise crushed because of its poor reviews—reviews that were brushed under the rug of the site that has become the Siskel & Ebert of its day?”
The problem with blaming bad reviews for a film’s performance is that related data is held close to the chest by both Hollywood and aggregate movie rating sites. While a studio is proud to announce when its blockbuster is “Certified Fresh,” the same studio or its directors will blame Rotten Tomatoes if that same film loses money. However, the general public will never understand the true impact either way because studios will never reveal how much money they lost or other factors that went into a film’s success.
Unfortunately, the solution isn’t as simple as “don’t make a bad movie,” because as an art form, a film’s entertainment value is entirely subjective.
“Good reviews don’t necessarily make or break a movie—they can, and they can’t,” Bible concluded. “It depends on the marketing, the timing and so many other factors.”
