As many people continue to use and rely on Rotten Tomatoes to get a sense of how good a movie is and to often decide whether a movie is worth seeing or not, I think it’s important to remind people that the Rotten Tomato score is not calculated as probably most people assume it is. Let’s get into it:
Most people perceive it as a movie that has a 99% rating on RT means that the movie is reviewed as outstanding with a score of 9.9 on 10 or 99 on 100 for example. But it actually doesn’t mean this at all.
Likewise, people often assume as RT critic rating of 50% as being on fairly poorly rated movie with a score of 5 on 10 or 50 on 100, whereas again, this is completely inaccurate.
I score of 99% means that 99% of the reviews were positive reviews. The reviews all could all have said things along the line of “a fairly good movie..” and it would be treated as a positive review. This doesn’t discriminate between a review saying that the movie was fairly good and a review saying that it was the best movie of the century. Both are treated as just a positive review. So a 99% rating on RT in no way means the movie was outstanding. In fact, 99% of the reviewers could have given it a score of 7/10 and it the RT rating would be 99%.
The same applies for a movie with a 50% rating. 50% of the reviewers might have said that the movie is the best piece of work of all time, and 50% of the reviewers saying it was a fairly poor movie. If 50% of reviewers gave the movie a 10 on 10 score and the other 50% gave the the movie a 5 on 10 score, then the average scoring would be 7.5 on 10 and actually better than the movie that had a 99% on RT.