Film criticism is one of my most cherished passions in life. I can spend hours talking about my thoughts on any film that I see. The conversations that some films can inspire are some of my favorite parts about the medium.
One of my dreams is to become a respected film critic within the entertainment industry. While I would love for people to look to my work to gauge whether a specific film would be of interest to them, I would also want to always encourage people to see films and create their own opinions on them.
I think one thing that is wrong with the film industry today is that audiences tend to get so wrapped up in what critics think about a film, good or bad, that they go into a film already knowing how they feel about it before it even begins.
Rotten Tomatoes is a core element that leads to people forming preconceived notions about how they should be expected to feel about a film before they even see it. A lot of times, audiences tend to allow the Rotten Tomatoes score that a film receives be the sole determinant of whether it is good or bad. This is extremely problematic on its own because Rotten Tomatoes scores don’t even accurately reflect how critics really feel about various films. If a film receives a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, that does not mean that every critic gave the film a 10/10 or a 5/5. Rotten Tomatoes takes the aggregate scores that critics give films to create fresh or rotten scores. Critics can all give a film a 6/10, and that film would still have a 100% rating because all of the reviews lean positive, even though it isn’t perfect. A film can receive nothing but 4/10 reviews from critics and that film would have a 0% because all of the reviews lean negative, even though the film isn’t completely terrible. It takes one negative-leaning review to bring a film down from a 100% rating to a 99% rating.
If audiences really want an accurate representation of how critics feel about a film, they should look at the average score rather that the Rotten Tomatoes score, itself. For example, from 253 reviews, “Black Adam,” the latest superhero film from DC currently has a 40% score. However, if someone were to look at the average rating, they would see that most critics gave the film roughly a 5/10 rating rather than a 4/10. It just so happens that the 153 critics who leaned negative outnumbered the 100 critics who leaned positive enough to bump the film down to a 40% instead of a 50%.
I believe that if there were a wider understanding about how Rotten Tomatoes and other popular sites like it work, people would be less eager to see films with a review already written in their mind before the lights in the theater even go down. They would instead understand that the beautiful part about film is that it is a completely subjective art form. The way you feel about a film does not have to align with what someone else thinks about it, no matter how respected they are. The thing that keeps conversations about film so interesting is that everyone is able to formulate a different opinion to contribute to those magnificent and often enlightening conversations.
Let me know what you thought about the latest movie you've seen in the comments.
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