Patched Tomatoes
Patched Tomatoes is a Chrome extension that replaces the Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes with the Critics' Average Rating. It does the same for the Audience Score. I believe the Tomatometer score is calculated in a misleading way, and this extension aims to fix that.
How Rotten Tomatoes Works
Let's create some films for the sake of example. Each film received 5 critic reviews. Here they are:
| Film | Emma | Liam | Olivia | Noah | Ava |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frostbite | 4.5/10 | 2.5/5 | 4.5/10 | 5/10 | 5/10 |
| Blue Harvest | 1/10 | 1/5 | 1.5/10 | 2/10 | 1/10 |
| Prime Directive | 9/10 | 5/5 | 9.5/10 | 9/10 | 9/10 |
| Artemis | 5.5/10 | 3/5 | 5.5/10 | 6/10 | 6/10 |
Upon reviewing these ratings - one might assume that Prime Directive is amazing, Blue Harvest is bad, and the remaining two films are similarly mediocre. What would Rotten Tomatoes say? Here's their definition of a &lquo;Fresh&rquo; film:
The Tomatometer score represents the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film or television show... When at least 60% of reviews for a movie or TV show are positive, a red tomato is displayed to indicate its Fresh status.
What does this mean for our example films? First, we need to convert each critic rating to a binary &lquo;positive&rquo; or &lquo;not positive&rquo; review. In most cases, Rotten Tomatoes considers 5.5/10 and above a &lquo;positive&rquo; review.
| Film | Emma | Liam | Olivia | Noah | Ava |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frostbite | - | - | - | - | - |
| Blue Harvest | - | - | - | - | - |
| Prime Directive | + | + | + | + | + |
| Artemis | + | + | + | + | + |
Per Rotten Tomatoes definition, both Frostbite and Blue Harvest would receive a rotten Tomatometer score of 0%, while Prime Directive and Artemis both receive a fresh score of 100%. Do you feel misled?
A Better Way
This is where Patched Tomatoes comes in. I find that simply looking at a film's average rating is much more interesting. Let's convert the critic ratings to percentages and calculate their average:
| Film | Emma | Liam | Olivia | Noah | Ava |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frostbite | 45% | 50% | 45% | 50% | 50% |
| Blue Harvest | 10% | 20% | 15% | 20% | 10% |
| Prime Directive | 90% | 100% | 95% | 90% | 90% |
| Artemis | 55% | 60% | 55% | 60% | 60% |
These average out to the following:
- Frostbite: 48%
- Blue Harvest: 15%
- Prime Directive: 93%
- Artemis: 58%
Perhaps Artemis isn't the critically-acclaimed film Rotten Tomatoes indicated.
One side effect of this is that it's a lot harder for a film to get a 100% rating. In fact, the only way for this to happen would be if every single critic agreed that it was a perfect film - and this has never happened. The current highest-ranking films are Citizen Kane and The Wizard of Oz at ~94%.
I posit that it's all the more impressive for a modern film to reach this level of consensus given the sheer number of critics rating films online today. Which number tells you more, that Parasite (with 356 total reviews) received a Tomatometer rating of 99%, or that Parasite's average rating is 93.7%?
If you would like to install Patched Tomatoes for yourself, head to mknepprath/patched-tomatoes on GitHub and follow the instructions.