10 Movies Rated Fresh On Rotten Tomatoes That Would Be Rotten If Released Today

Rotten Tomatoes has come under a lot fire recently. Or, more accurately, it's got caught in the crossfire between die-hard fans and the critical body that submits their reviews to the site's basic scoring algorithm. But while it's hard to sympathise with people who make petitions to shut down aggregate sites, it certainly seems that, compared to ten years ago, critics are indeed scoring movies more harshly, evidenced by the percentage score getting awarded to new releases by the site.

Look at the X-Men movies: The Last Stand (57%) sits a almost ten points about Apocalypse (48%), even though it's hard to find anything that really differentiates the two. Both have a myriad of disconnected plots that can be left for vast stretches a time, an underdeveloped ensemble that keeps bumping into dispensable cameos and even lazily butcher the Dark Phoenix Saga. Had their release been switched, you wouldn't be surprised to see the Tomatometer rating change too.

This is far from an isolated incident. There's lots of movies that sit proud with a Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes that, if they were released today would be in for a bit of a rude, Rotten awakening. It's especially prominent with superheroes and other geek properties, which have had a real shift in cultural positioning as the 21st Century's expanded, but it does stretch wider than that. Here's ten films that you can bet would be Rotten if they were released today.

Forget the erroneous claims of Marvel paying off critics - the reason MCU films are so widely praised is because they tend to be pretty good. If you go back to the pre-Avengers Phase 1, however, it's not as assured as things are now. The Incredible Hulk actually does have a Rotten rating (it's pretty much ignored by all but purists though), and if we were to get everyone to reassess the early entries of the series stalwarts we'd likely see Iron Man 2 joining it.

Iron Man 2 came in that superhero sweet spot where the original love of the basic idea of comic book movies was waning, but treating it as a genuine, nuanced genre, thanks to the 2008 doubly-whammy of Iron Man and The Dark Knight, was all the rage. On the back of that, a sequel to the former was treated with undue (and ultimately unfair) reverence.

There is stuff to like in the movie - Robert Downey Jr. is still great as the lead - but it's a bit of muddle, with a lazy, convoluted plot and desperate over-reliance on setting up The Avengers. The Batman V Superman parallels are potent, and while it's nothing close to that trainwreck, ten Marvel movies later critics would be unlikely to be as willing to let that stuff slide.