science

Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Rotten Tomatoes rather than just read about it. In short: Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y.

Key takeaways

Rotten Tomatoes belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Rotten Tomatoes to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Rotten Tomatoes from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang. Although the name "Rotten Tomatoes" connects to the practice of audiences throwing rotten tomatoes in disapproval of a poor stage performance, the direct inspiration for the name from Duong, Lee, and Wang came from an equivalent scene in the 1992 Canadian film Léolo. Since January 2010, Rotten Tomatoes has been owned by Flixster, which was in turn acquired by Warner Bros. in 2011. In February 2016, Rotten Tomatoes and its parent site Flixster were sold to Versant's (then NBCUniversal's) Fandango ticketing company. Warner Bros. retained a minority stake in the merged entities, including Fandango. According to a 2018 survey, almost a third of United States adult moviegoers said they had consulted the site before going to the cinema. It has been criticized for oversimplifying reviews by flattening them into a fresh versus rotten dichotomy. It has also been criticized for being easy for studios to manipulate by limiting early screenings to critics inclined to be favorable, among other tactics.

History

Rotten Tomatoes was launched on August 12, 1998, as a spare-time project by Senh Duong. His objective in creating Rotten Tomatoes was "to create a site where people can get access to reviews from a variety of critics in the U.S". As a fan of Jackie Chan, Duong was inspired to create the website after collecting all the reviews of Chan's Hong Kong action movies as they were being released in the United States. The catalyst for the creation of the website was Rush Hour (1998), Chan's first major Hollywood crossover, which was originally planned to release in August 1998. Duong coded the website in two weeks and the site went live the same month, but the release of Rush Hour was delayed until September 1998. Besides Jackie Chan films, he began including other films on Rotten Tomatoes, extending it beyond Chan's fandom. The first non-Chan Hollywood movie whose reviews were featured on Rotten Tomatoes was Your Friends & Neighbors (1998). The website was an immediate success, receiving mentions by Netscape, Yahoo!, and USA Today within the first week of its launch; it attracted "600–1,000 daily unique visitors" as a result. Duong teamed up with University of California, Berkeley classmates Patrick Y. Lee and Stephen Wang, his former partners at the Berkeley, California-based web design firm Design Reactor, to pursue Rotten Tomatoes on a full-time basis. They officially launched it on April 1, 2000. In June 2004, IGN Entertainment acquired Rotten Tomatoes for an undisclosed sum. In September 2005, IGN was bought by News Corp's Fox Interactive Media. In January 2010, IGN sold the website to Flixster. The combined reach of both companies is 30 million unique visitors a month across all different platforms, according to the companies. In 2011, Warner Bros. acquired Rotten Tomatoes. In early 2009, Current Television launched The Rotten Tomatoes Show, a televised version of the web review site. It was hosted by Brett Erlich and Ellen Fox and written by Mark Ganek. The show aired Thursdays at 10:30 EST until September 16, 2010. It returned as a much shorter segment of InfoMania, a satirical news show that ended in 2011. By late 2009, the website was designed to enable Rotten Tomatoes users to create and join groups to discuss various aspects of film. One group, "The Golden Oyster Awards", accepted votes of members for various awards, spoofing the better-known Academy Awards or Golden Globes. When Flixster bought the company, they disbanded the groups. As of February 2011, new community features have been added and others removed. For example, users can no longer sort films by Fresh Ratings from Rotten Ratings, and vice versa. On September 17, 2013, a section devoted to scripted television series, called TV Zone, was created as a subsection of the website. In February 2016, Rotten Tomatoes and its parent site Flixster were sold to Comcast's Fandango Media. Warner Bros retained a minority stake in the merged entities, including Fandango. In December 2016, Fandango and all its various websites moved to Fox Interactive Media's former headquarters in Beverly Hills, California. In July 2017, the website's editor-in-chief since 2007, Matt Atchity, left to join The Young Turks YouTube channel. On November 1, 2017, the site launched a new web series on Facebook, See It/Skip It, hosted by Jacqueline Coley and Segun Oduolowu. In March 2018, the site announced its new design, icons and logo for the first time in 19 years at South by Southwest. On May 19, 2020, Rotten Tomatoes won the 2020 Webby People's Voice Award for Entertainment in the Web category. In February 2021, the Rotten Tomatoes staff made an entry on their Product Blog, announcing several design changes to the site: Each film's 'Score Box' at the top of the page would now also include its release year, genre, and runtimes, with an MPAA rating to be soon added; the number of ratings would be shown in groupings – from 50+ up to 250,000+ ratings, for easier visualization. Links to critics and viewers are included underneath the ratings. By clicking on either the Tomatometer Score or the Audience Score, the users can access "Score Details" information, such as the number of Fresh and Rotten reviews, average rating, and Top Critics' score. The team also added a new "What to Know" section for each film entry page, which could combine the "Critics Consensus" blurb with a new "Audience Says" blurb, so users can see an at-a-glance summary of the sentiments of both certified critics and verified audience members.

Features

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Rotten Tomatoes: Example of a "What to Know" section for a Rotten Tomatoes entry page, for the 2017 film Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle — Example of a "What to Know" section for a Rotten Tomatoes entry page, for the 2017 film Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Rotten Tomatoes

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Rotten Tomatoes claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Rotten Tomatoes before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Rotten Tomatoes ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Rotten Tomatoes

In research: Rotten Tomatoes appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Rotten Tomatoes in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Rotten Tomatoes is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1998 establishments in California, 2010 mergers and acquisitions, 2016 mergers and acquisitions, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Rotten Tomatoes outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study Rotten Tomatoes in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Rotten Tomatoes means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Rotten Tomatoes out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Rotten Tomatoes in simple terms?

Why does Rotten Tomatoes matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Rotten Tomatoes?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Rotten Tomatoes.