10 Ways You're Thinking About The Movie Industry All Wrong

7. The Tomatometer

What You Think: OK, so figuring out how much a movie made is pretty tricky. But we can definitely tell whether it's any good with ease. There's sites out there, like RottenTomatoes, that exist just for this purpose, bringing together all the critical opinons. And, to save you actually having to read reviews, they condense them down into one simple percentage. If it's high the film is good, if it's low the film is bad. It can't be any more complex than that, right? The Truth: The way the Tomatometer measures critical appraisal is indeed very simple; each review is marked as either good or bad and the meter reading is the percentage of positive reviews. But what classes as a positive review is contentious. Most reviews don't fall into one camp, with the traditional five-star rating having no easy dividing point. This means that a review gives a film a 3/5 (i.e. average) counts as much to a positive rating as a glowing 5/5 appraisal. This leads to a strange skew on the meter (0-30% is 1 star, 30-60% is 2 star, 60-70% is 3 star, 70-85% is 4 star and 85-100% is 5 star), but that's well noted; there's some even stranger results. Take Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol. It's a solid action film that offers little else, but as it's not bad per se its Tomatometer score is ridiculously high; it gets a thumbs up from 93% of critics and 88% of the sites 'top' critics. This made it the 7th best wide release of the year according to the site, despite the average rating from critics being only 7.1/10 (equivalent of a high 3 star rating). So a solid blockbuster is treated as a masterpiece. The Tomatometer is a powerful tool, but it's easy to misread.