Movie review aggregators have gained tremendous influence over the decision of whether or not moviegoers choose to pay to see a film in theatres, and yet the methods use to achieve scores for films by various aggregators tends to be poorly understood, so it’s easy to make a false assumption that a 70% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes should be understood as an average of all scores. This is not the case: Rotten Tomatoes “gives all positive reviews…a flat score of 1/1 and all negative reviews…a score of 0/1.”

Stop and think about that statement for a moment. A review of 5 stars, 4.5 stars, 4 starts, 3.5 stars, 3 stars, and 2.5 stars are all converted to a single point. However, an analysis of RT scores concluded the aggregator does not include the lowest possible rating of a 0.5 star review in it’s scoring algorithm. This means anyone who gives a film what is ostensibly the lowest possible score get excluded from the overall audience score.

A score anywhere between 1 and 2 stars is converted to zero, while 2.5 converts to a score of 1.

The RT algorithm strips away any question of, “How much did you like this film” and renders your score into a simple thumbs up / thumbs down evaluation, but it excludes the most negative reviews without being transparent about it.

The final RT audience score is a percentage of the reviews that were ‘positive’, while skewing data by blocking any zero star reviews and ignoring all the 0.5 star reviews.

A good question to ask might be, “Why?” And important factor to understand is that the parent company that owns Rotten Tomatoes is Fandango, a ticket-selling company owned by another company that happens to own production companies like Warner Brothers.

Should we be suspicious of review aggregators? There’s is an argument to be made for great writers who love cinema and can articulate why or when a film is worth seeing.