In some ways, the movie review website Rotten Tomatoes is the opposite of Siskel and Ebert. Their viewers depended on the insights of two individuals that they trusted, and felt they knew.
Rotten Tomatoes aggregates and averages reviews from lots of critics to assign a movie a number ranking, and declare it “fresh” or “rotten”.
Since its launch 25 years ago, it’s become the the go to site for lots of potential movie goers, offering everything they need to decide whether or not a movie is worth seeing.
But for a while now, there have been complaints about the way the site ranks films. And concerns that those rankings unfairly influence whether a movie succeeds or bombs.
Host Scott Detrow talks to Lane Brown, who took the site to task in a recent article on Vulture, and film critic Jamie Broadnax, editor-in-chief of the culture site, Black Girl Nerds.