The influence of reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes has become more and more widespread over the last couple of years, and the site regularly gains column inches focused on how terrified studios are of the green splat signifying their movie is "rotten" and how it's ruining their box office.

You might think that the % score applied to each film represents an average of how good it is according to the critical and audience community. You would be dead wrong. And that's the problem.

Paramount

[Baywatch: 19% on Rotten Tomatoes]

It's true that the site has grown in profile and that it certainly influences some people's viewing decisions. The National Research Group, for example, found that 7 out of 10 people would be less likely to see a movie if RT gave it a score of 0-25.

And quite right too (in a way) – if a studio doesn't want its box office affected by negative reviews, they should make better films. Reductive, perhaps, but it's not the critics', or indeed Rotten Tomatoes' fault if people don't want to throw £10-15 plus popcorn at something that's not any good.

So don't get us wrong. We like Rotten Tomatoes.

But the problem is that it turns film reviews into an unnatural binary choice – either "fresh" or "rotten" – and that isn't how reviewing works.

Columbia Pictures

[The Emoji Movie: 6% on Rotten Tomatoes]

Here's how RT explains its rating system:

A good review is denoted by a fresh red tomato. In order for a movie or TV show to receive an overall rating of Fresh, the reading on the Tomatometer for that movie must be at least 60%.

A bad review is denoted by a rotten green tomato splat (59% or less).

To receive a Certified Fresh rating a movie must have a steady Tomatometer rating of 75% or better. Movies opening in wide release need at least 80 reviews from Tomatometer Critics (including 5 Top Critics). Movies opening in limited release need at least 40 reviews from Tomatometer Critics (including 5 Top Critics). A TV show must have a Tomatometer Score of 75% or better with 20 or more reviews from Tomatometer Critics (including 5 Top Critics). If the Tomatometer score drops below 70%, then the movie or TV show loses its Certified Fresh status. In some cases, the Certified Fresh designation may be held at the discretion of the Rotten Tomatoes editorial team.

So, to get its percentage score, RT boils all film reviews down to Fresh or Rotten and works out the percentage represented by each. It does not allow for a film to be "so-so" and nor does it allow for any nuance as to exactly how bad or good a film is.

Warner Bros.

[Annabelle: Creation – 100% on Rotten Tomatoes]

This is why, for example, Annabelle: Creation currently has an RT score of 100% while Dunkirk is only on 93%. We liked Annabelle: Creation, it was good and scary. But in no world is it better than Dunkirk – and we're sure most of the critics who liked both films would agree.

What it means is that the 14 critics (including Digital Spy) who have written about Annabelle: Creation so far have all thought it was decent – none of us thought it was crap. (Reviewers can either define their own review as Fresh/Rotten or leave it to RT to interpret their words appropriately.)

Meanwhile, of the 318 critics who have written about Dunkirk, 23 rated it as Rotten. But plenty of the 295 more positive critics actually thought it was brilliant. Ourselves included – we gave it a five-star rating, while Annabelle: Creation was just a high three for us.

It's easy to confuse the % number on Rotten Tomatoes for a rating of quality, but that's not what it is, it's a rating of consensus. The higher the score, the more consensus there is that the film is Fresh rather than Rotten. NOT "the higher the score the better the film".

A movie with 95% is not 20% better than a movie with 75% – the scores don't measure quality.

[Antichrist: 50% on Rotten Tomatoes]

Therefore Rotten Tomatoes doesn't work for divisive movies – the "either you love it or you hate it" kind. If a film absolutely splits people, it'll end up with a middling rating. Which is the case with, for example, Lars von Trier's highly controversial Antichrist, which scores exactly 50%. This doesn't mean it's an average movie, it means there is absolutely no critical consensus over whether it's good or not. You'll either think it's awesome or appalling, but what you won't think is that it was just okay. It's very much that kind of movie.

What RT does do is give a vague sense of whether critics in general thought a movie was decent or poor without any further finesse than that, treating a not-bad three-star film in the same way it does a five-star masterpiece, and by the same token, a two-star valiant effort the same as an irredeemable one-star piece of bilge.

For those of us who review out of five stars, it presents a further problem too, since an awful lot of films are three stars. They're okay. They're decent if you like that sort of thing, they start well but tail off at the end. There is no "average" rating on RT so the critics (or the staff at RT) have to decide to assign a three-star rating to the Fresh or Rotten camp.

Warner Bros.

[Dunkirk: 93% on Rotten Tomatoes]

In theory then, making an inoffensive, middle-of-the-road movie that won't annoy anyone is a surer way to get a high score on RT than making something bold, beautiful and challenging, but which might ruffle a few feathers.

So is Rotten Tomatoes really destroying the film industry (as Brett Ratner, for one, would have it)? We don't think so, as long as audiences understand how to use it – as a consensus overview but not a comparative measure of quality.

To get a more thorough and useful critical opinion, well, you can always read the reviewers you trust the most…

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