‘Star Wars’ Fans Petition to Shut Down Rotten Tomatoes Over Good Rating

Would it surprise you if I told you that people on the internet were mad about something? If I told you that thing was Star Wars, would you be even less surprised? How about if we throw Rotten Tomatoes into the mix? Shocked yet? Scandalized?

If there’s one thing people like to get lathered up about on the Internet, it’s when they disagree with a critic. Today it’s a petition to shut down Rotten Tomatoes because Star Wars: The Last Jedi had a much higher score from critics than from audiences; last year it was a petition to shut down Rotten Tomatoes because Suicide Squad, which turned out to be a shitty attempt to copy Guardians of the Galaxy, got bad reviews. Oh, and remember when Richard Roeper, of all people, was branded a sexist for giving a negative review to the dreadful Ghostbusters remake?

Here’s the thing about Rotten Tomatoes. All they do is release an aggregate score of all the reviews a movie has received from websites, newspapers and magazines. That’s it. The reason a movie has a high or low score on Rotten Tomatoes is because critics either liked it or hated it. They also have an audience score, where users of the website can leave their opinion. Sometimes, and this seems to have been happening a lot recently on very high profile movies, critics and audiences disagree.

My favorite new show of the season has been, hands down, The Orville, Seth McFarlane’s brilliant Star Trek pastiche. I’m not the only person who loved the comedy-drama, as it’s currently sitting at a 93% positive audience score, despite a terrible 20% from critics. Star Wars: The Last Jedi is on the opposite end of the scale, with a 91% rating from critics and 52% score from audiences.

This is what has everyone’s conspiracy-loving panties in a bunch. I guess the guy who made this petition thinks Rotten Tomatoes is part of some conspiracy theory to make Disney films do better in theaters or something.

RT has a very flawed  aggregate rating and broken system. 3/5 score for a disney film is listed a fresh/good review and the same 3/5 review score for non disney blockbusters are listed as rotten/bad review. The tomatometer system is extremely broken and unreliable. For example if a movies has aggregate critics rating score of  6/10 and another movies has 9/10 aggregate critics score. Both movies will have 90 percent on tomatometer. RT is a horrible review aggregate site and very unreliable. IMdb and metacritic ratings is more reliable site for movie reviews.

Metacritic has a very similar aggregate score for The Last Jedi, an 86 from critics and a 4.7 from audiences, because they put scores from critics on a 100 point scale and audience scores on a 10 point scale, but sure, that’s better, guy. Not confusing at all.

Look, you can’t just shut down a website because you don’t like it. Which is lucky for us, we have made some enemies.

In the end, you’ve got to take critics’ reviews of movies with a grain of salt. They may not be looking for the same thing as you in a movie. I’ve found that since The Phantom Menace, I walk out of a first viewing of the Star Wars movies having really enjoyed them; it isn’t until a second viewing that I’ve gone “Oh, this is kind of shitty, actually.” I’m not sure about The Last Jedi, I haven’t seen it yet. After the last five Star Wars movies, I prefer to be disappointed in my own home rather than to spend an evening out at the theater being disappointed. And if the insider whispers about the new Han Solo movie are right, I’m not the only one.