Rotten Tomatoes Has Been Hacked, Which Is Yet Another Reason You Shouldn't Rely On It
In 2017, director Martin Scorsese wrote an essay in The Hollywood Reporter which referred to the movie review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes as being "hostile to serious filmmakers." Now, there's new evidence that Rotten Tomatoes is not only hostile to filmmakers, but also to anyone who reads a Rotten Tomatoes score.
Vulture has published an article revealing that, for at least the past five years, Rotten Tomatoes has been hacked and manipulated by a PR firm that has actually paid obscure, low-level members of Rotten Tomatoes to provide positive coverage of the films that PR company represents, all in a shameless effort to boost those films' RT scores.
This brazen hijacking, combined with film studios' increasing reliance on the Tomatometer as a marketing tool and the long-complained-about and imprecise nature of how Rotten Tomatoes scores actually work, is yet another reason why that platform should not hold the position it holds in the cultural conversation about movies.
The hacking
The Vulture report shines a light on a PR company called Bunker 15, which was hired to work on the 2018 Daisy Ridley indie film, "Ophelia." After its earliest screenings, the film had earned a 46% on Rotten Tomatoes — enough to designate the movie as "rotten" on the platform's scale. That wasn't good enough for Bunker 15, who went about manipulating the percentages in the film's favor. As Vulture explained:
While most film-PR companies aim to get the attention of critics from top publications, Bunker 15 takes a more bottom-up approach, recruiting obscure, often self-published critics who are nevertheless part of the pool tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. In another break from standard practice, several critics say, Bunker 15 pays them $50 or more for each review.
Bunker 15 also asked another critic who wrote a negative review to change the Rotten Tomatoes rating on their review from negative to positive.
Overall, the company's plan worked: With an influx of new paid-for positive reviews, "Ophelia" jumped to a "fresh" 62% and was acquired by IFC Films for distribution in the U.S.
Rotten Tomatoes told Vulture that it does not "tolerate any attempts to manipulate" its scores, yet Bunker 15 has been doing this for years, with multiple movies. How many other companies have done something similar?
Rotten Tomatoes is bad for movies
How many people who check Rotten Tomatoes scores understand how to interpret the numbers they're seeing? If a movie has an 80%, that does not mean that its average review score from participating critics is 80%. Instead, Rotten Tomatoes shaves off the nuances of a film review and funnels every reaction into a much more ambiguous (and easily manipulatable) "positive or negative," and then divides the number of positives by the total. And as Vulture reminds us, every review carries the same weight, whether it's from a major outlet or a comparatively tiny but still RT-approved site.
And that's not even getting into the ethical questions about Rotten Tomatoes itself, which is owned by movie ticket seller Fandango (which is itself owned by Comcast, which also owns Universal Pictures) as well as Warner Bros., which retains a 25% stake in the company. To be absolutely clear, there have not been any bombshell reports about those particular studios juicing the scores for their films above their competitors, but the very fact that such a thing is even possible is far from ideal.
I realize, of course, that the rise of Rotten Tomatoes has been fueled by our society's obsession with maximizing the results of every decision we make. This is not a finger-wagging situation — I'm an active participant in this. I regularly use Yelp to find the best restaurants in my area, and I Google things like "best power saw 2023" before buying a new tool. We all live in a world in which we want answers about quality as quickly as possible without having to do much work. And there's nothing easier than glancing at a Rotten Tomatoes score and judging a movie based on the number sitting next to it.
But what if art is worth a little extra work?
How to break the spell
While Hollywood studios are still caught in the thrall of Rotten Tomatoes and will likely still be influenced by whatever nebulous numbers appear there in the coming years, there's a surefire way moviegoers can avoid the messiness altogether: Stop caring about Rotten Tomatoes scores. Now that you know how they work and how easily they can be manipulated, there's no reason to be swayed by flashy numbers boasted about in trailers or TV spots. Those scores have always been vague at best, and now we know they're crooked at worst; the quality/efficiency contract we thought we entered into when using that service has been shredded so severely as to make the entire encounter essentially meaningless.
Instead, I recommend finding a selection of movie critics you like, in whatever medium you like. Listen to podcasts. Watch TikToks. Read sites like this one. And don't just find voices that parrot your own previously held worldview back to you — toss in a couple that you respect, but sometimes disagree with. Perhaps you'll find your cinematic boundaries expanding; discovering a new genre or filmmaker you love is a thrilling feeling, and an expanded pool of analysis and recommendations can lead you to some wonderful and unexpected places. And the Rotten Tomatoes platform isn't wholly useless here — one could use its critic blurbs as a jumping-off point to reading, watching, or listening to the full reviews which provide the nuances that have been purposefully shaved off.
I know this suggestion requires more effort than simply clocking one number and making a decision based on that. But at its best, art can be provocative, entertaining, challenging, moving, and even, yes, life-changing. Maybe, when it comes to selecting whether to watch something with such powerful potential rewards, we can meet the art halfway.