Rotten Tomatoes

URL	http://www.rottentomatoes.com/
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Online cinematic reviews
Registration	Optional
Owner	News Corporation (via IGN)
Created by	Senh Duong
Launched	1998

Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films. The name derives from the historical cliché of throwing tomatoes and other produce at stage performers if a performance was particularly bad.

[edit] History

Rotten Tomatoes was launched on August 19, 1998 as a spare time project by Senh Duong.^[1] His goal in creating Rotten Tomatoes was "to create a site where people can get access to reviews from a variety of critics in the U. S."^[2] His inspiration came when, as a fan of Jackie Chan, Duong started collecting all the reviews of Chan's movies as they were coming out in the United States. The first movie reviewed on Rotten Tomatoes was Your Friends & Neighbors. The website was an immediate success, receiving mentions by Yahoo!, Netscape, and USA Today within the first week of its launching; it attracted "600 - 1000 daily unique visitors" as a result.

Rotten Tomatoes is published out of IGN Entertainment headquarters in Brisbane, California, and LA, California, London, UK and Sydney, Australia.

Duong teamed up with Patrick Lee and Stephen Wang, his former partners at the Berkeley, California-based web design firm Design Reactor to pursue Rotten Tomatoes as a full-time start-up company, officially launching on April 1, 1999.^[3]

In June 2004, IGN Entertainment acquired Rottentomatoes.com for an undisclosed sum.^[4] In September 2005, IGN was bought out by News Corp's Fox Interactive Media.^[5]

The site has some of the most heavy traffic on the Internet, ranking in the top 1,000 websites visited according to Alexa Internet. The current Editor in Chief is Matt Atchity and the Vice President and General Manager is Shannon Ludovissy.

[edit] Description

A Certified Fresh logo

Rotten Tomatoes includes online reviews from authors that are certified members of various writing guilds or film critic associations. The staff then determine for each review whether it is positive ("fresh", marked by a small icon of a red tomato) or negative ("rotten", marked by a small icon of a green splatted tomato).

The website keeps track of all of the reviews counted (which can approach 270 for major, recently released films) and the percentage of positive reviews is tabulated. If the positive reviews make up 60% or more, the film is considered "fresh" in that a supermajority of the reviewers approve of the film. If the positive reviews are less than 60%, then the film is considered "rotten." In addition, major film reviewers like Roger Ebert, Desson Thomson/Stephen Hunter (Washington Post), and Lisa Schwarzbaum (Entertainment Weekly), are listed in a sub-listing called "Top Critics", which tabulates their reviews separately, while still including their opinions in the general rating. When there are sufficient reviews to form a conclusion, a consensus statement is posted which is intended to articulate the general reasons for the opinion. The ratings favor recent releases and films with large numbers of reviews over older films, due to the scarcity of archived reviews for such older films.

This rating in turn is marked with an equivalent icon when the film is listed, giving the reader a one glance look at the general critical opinion about the work. Movies with a Tomatometer of 75% or better and at least 40 reviews from Tomatometer Critics (including 5 Top Critics) receive the "Certified Fresh" seal.^[6] As a result of the requirements for quantity of ratings, there may be films with 100% positive ratings which don't have the certificate due to insufficient reviews to be sure of the freshness.

There are several films that have received a 100% freshness rating with fewer reviews including Toy Story, Toy Story 2, The Evil Dead, The Wizard of Oz, The Terminator, Before Sunrise, Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather, All About Eve, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Pinocchio, Rear Window, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Jaws, Triumph of the Will, Man on Wire, Mary Poppins, Zulu, and The Killer, and there are over 200 films that have so far received a 0% freshness rating such as universally panned films like Witless Protection, One Missed Call, and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2. The site has recently^[when?] included a page of the "100 Worst Reviewed Films of All time."

In addition to reviews, Rotten Tomatoes hosts message forums, where thousands of participants take part in the discussion of movies, video games, music and other topics. In addition, users are able to rate and review films themselves. Every movie also features a "user average" that calculates the percentage of users that have rated the film positively in a manner similar to how the critics' reviews are calculated. However, this score is more specific as the users are able to rate the movie on a scale of 1-10 (compared to critic reviews, which usually use 4-star ratings and are often simply qualitative). Like the critic's reviews, a score of 6 or higher is considered "fresh".

Rotten Tomatoes review their films by taking all other critic reviews and then collating them together on one website.

[edit] Correlation with profits

According to a non-scientific study by Erik Lundegaard, films released in 2007 which are scored "fresh" make, on average, $1000 more per screen than films which are scored as "rotten".^[7]

Another study by USA Today in 2003, unrelated to Rotten Tomatoes, also produced similar results: "the better the reviews, the higher the box office". The newspaper found that, contrary to popular belief, film critics and moviegoers agree more often than not.^[8]

[edit] International

Localised versions of the site are available in the UK and Australia. Readers accessing Rotten Tomatoes from France and Germany are automatically redirected to the UK version of the site that provides local release dates, cinema listings, box office results and promotes reviews from UK critics. There is currently no way for these users to view the US version of the site, other than via tunneling or through the use of a suitable proxy server. The localized versions of the site contain all of the US editorial content, reviews and film lists and are augmented by local content maintained by editors based in London and Sydney.

[edit] The Rotten Tomatoes Show

In early 2009, Current Television launched the televised version of the web review site, The Rotten Tomatoes Show which is hosted by Brett Erlich and Ellen Fox. The writer of the show is Mark Ganek. The show appears every Thursday at 10:30 Eastern and Pacific Time on the Current TV network.^[9] However it re-runs itself on occasion.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official website
  • List of approved RottenTomatoes Critics
  • RottenTomatoes forums
  • Rotten Tomatoes: The Best of the Best Pictures
  • Rotten Tomatoes: The Worst of the Worst Pictures
  • Matt Atchity on The Young Turks Show
  • The Rotten Tomatoes Show broadcast on CurrentTV.