Rotten Tomatoes Changed The Role Of Film Critics. But Is That A Good Thing?

If you're over a certain age and you love movies, when you think "movie critic", you probably picture Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert and their popular TV shows. Their iconic "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" move made it clear what each of them thought about a film. In some ways, the movie review website Rotten Tomatoes is the opposite of Siskel and Ebert. Their viewers depended on the insights of two individuals that they trusted, and felt they knew. Rotten Tomatoes aggregates and averages reviews from lots of critics to assign a movie a number ranking, and declare it "fresh" or "rotten". Since its launch 25 years ago, it's become the the go to site for lots of potential movie goers, offering everything they need to decide whether or not a movie is worth seeing. But for a while now, there have been complaints about the way the site ranks films. And concerns that those rankings unfairly influence whether a movie succeeds or bombs. Host Scott Detrow talks to Lane Brown, who took the site to task in a recent article on Vulture, and film critic Jamie Broadnax, editor-in-chief of the culture site, Black Girl Nerds. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy