[mxxx]

Regardless of the introduction of sycophantic reviewers, the 3/5 = fresh thing has always been a pretty half-ass threshold imo, and that a fact that a film can be "100% fresh" on RT on the basis of every single reviewer saying "yeah it's nothing special but it's fine, 3 stars" is fairly easy to misinterpret.

[padraigfl]

I think it's fine as a metric if you read it correctly.

100% means a film is extremely agreeable with whatever audience it has managed to get to. For major releases this can ultimately mean it's actually lacking anything particularly bold or interesting. This results in things like Frost/Nixon or Knives Out having higher ratings than broadly acclaimed films like Mulholland Drive or even There Will Be Blood; I know which ones I'd be more likely to put on with my extended family even if I don't especially like them.

But yeah, it's amazing how many people still don't grasp it after decades of getting angry about it.

[cubefox]

Yeah. Pixar movies are often close to 100%. IMDb ratings are usually far more reasonable.

[pbsds]

a mean rating of 3 can only be 100% fresh if the variance is 0

[bhaney]

That is what "every single reviewer saying '[...] 3 stars'" means, yeah.

[famouswaffles]

Yeah and his point is that's never going to happen lol. People bring up the 100% point a lot and it's a bit silly because a movie with a significant number of ratings is never going to have that kind of distribution.

That's why it's always a hypothetical never backed with actual examples. It's one of those things that sounds plausible until you look at the numbers. Movies close to 100% have pretty high average scores and Movies with majority 3/5's are nowhere near 100%.

Yeah 100% for RT doesn't mean 10/10, but that's it.

[foobarqux]

It’s just not true in practice: it’s pretty typical to find films with high rotten tomatoes scores and not very high metacritic scores; rotten tomatoes scores are pretty much useless unless you are not very discerning.

Examples:sovereign, how to make a million…, count of monte cristo, etc

[famouswaffles]

Yes it's just true in practice.

Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are not the same site and have different audiences. Even the most popular movies will barely scrap 60 reviewers on Metacritic.

Comparing them directly is meaningless. Unfortunately they removed the average score for critics percentage but it's still there for the audience percentage.

You're also just wrong. Those movies, especially the last two have high Metacritic scores.

[foobarqux]

> Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are not the same site and have different audiences.

Yes we are talking about aggregating critic reviews. It's true if you like what the mass audience likes you'll be fine with any kind of crude measure like rotten tomatoes (although you'll still be better off with IMDB scores).

> Even the most popular movies will barely scrap 60 reviewers on Metacritic.

If you are talking about critic reviews there really aren't that many movie critics and you don't need that many. If you are talking about user reviews that isn't what the site is geared for (and not what the users of the site want either, just go to IMDB).

> You're also just wrong. Those movies, especially the last two have high Metacritic scores.

75 is not a high metacritic score, not just in absolute terms, but particularly not relative to the (ridiculous) 97% of rotten tomatoes.

If you only want to watch a few movies a year (and presumably want them to be the "best") Metacritic is the only useful site (with the provisos that someone else posted about political films and modulating for your own personal preferences).

[kelseydh]

Weirdly I often find films with an RT score in the range of 40% to 60% with high-ish IMDB scores to be the most interesting.

Whereas an RT 90%+ score without IMDB/Metacritic consensus the film is good typically means its mass-produced common denominator Hollywood slop.

[foobarqux]

I've confirmed this is false using the clapper-massive-rotten-tomatoes dataset on Kaggle which contains reviews up to 2023 (so note the scores are different than current scores): there are in fact many movies that have high hot-or-not scores but are clustered near the 6/10 threshold among top 10% of movies according to number of reviews: e.g. The Peanuts Movie, The Good Lie, Gimme Danger, Dream Horse, etc. (filtering on reviews with numeric scores)

These are all movies with (at the time) >90% "approval" rating but average score about 7/10 with most reviews around the 6/10 threshold and tapering down at 7/10,8/10 (as opposed to being multi-modal/split-opinion, e.g. many at 6/10 and many also at 10/10).

[chongli]

Wouldn't we expect the most truly mediocre movies to have the lowest variance in opinions?

[throwup238]

That might be why the Marvel movies score so highly.

[kjkjadksj]

Maybe the rating system should be changed from fresh and rotten into clonally propagated and heirloom to reflect this nuance

[zdc1]

Yeah, I'd love a personalised Tomatometer. I'd only get out of bed for something 4 stars (8/10) or above, so I'd love to know the percentage of audience/reviewers that scored like that.

This would also give "cult classics" and interesting/creative films that are more love-it-or-hate-it a bit more of an edge in ratings over the lukewarm Marvel slop we see these days.