Rotten Tomatoes made a major change to how audience scores were calculated back in 2019. Many people don't realize what happened, but this single change is why The Odyssey score currently sits at a glowing 97%, yet standardizing the data properly reveals it is actually 56%.
The discrepancy comes down to how RT creates the "Verified Audience" score versus the "All Audience" score.
The Background: "Push" vs. "Pull" Before 2019, RT used a "pull" mechanic: an unverified user had to actively decide to leave a review, log in or create an account, navigate to the movie page, and submit their rating.
After 2019, RT shifted the primary score to a "push" notification via ticket processors like Fandango. A ticket buyer walking out of the theater gets a prompt: "Did you like the movie? Tap 1 to 5 stars." They tap a star, and they're done.
Removing UI friction is fine on paper, but making "Verified Audience" the default score under the new "Popcornmeter" branding changed everything. (And yes, given how predictable the resulting score inflation was, this was likely deliberate obfuscation by RT.)
How to See the Real Numbers Yourself Fortunately, the old "pull" audience data is still sitting right inside RT's page source code—if you know where to look:
Open The Odyssey on Rotten Tomatoes. Right-click anywhere on the page and select View Page Source (or press Ctrl+U / Cmd+U). Press Ctrl+F and search for media-scorecard-json. A few lines down, you'll see a JSON data block that looks like this (the likedCount and notLikedCount are what we want):
{"audienceAll":{"certifiedFresh":"certified","averageRating":"4.6","bandedRatingCount":"5,000+ Ratings", "likedCount":7858,"notLikedCount":646, "reviewCount":1719,"score":"92"...}
{"audienceVerified":{"certifiedFresh":"certified","averageRating":"4.8","bandedRatingCount":"5,000+ Verified Ratings", "likedCount":7360,"notLikedCount":258, "reviewCount":1126,"score":"97"...}
Extracting the True "Pull" Score To find the actual sentiment of independent web users, we just need to isolate the unverified votes from the combined "All Audience" pool:
Verified ("Push") Score: 7,360 likes / (7,360 + 258 total) = 96.6% (This is the 97% Popcornmeter score RT displays prominently for The Odyssey).
Unverified ("Pull") Score:
Unverified Likes: 7,858 - 7,360 = 498 Unverified Dislikes: 646 - 258 = 388 Calculation: 498 / (498 + 388) = 498 / 886 = 56.2% (This is the more valid audience score for The Odyssey) Summary Out of 886 active Rotten Tomatoes users who – at the time of this writing – navigated to the site on their own to rate The Odyssey, only 498 (56%) rated it positively.
The current generated 97% score displayed so prominently is simply an artifact of a push notification pipeline heavily biased toward opening-weekend ticket buyers.
Source: /r/kotakuinaction
Assuming the data is correct. Hollywood is dying and losing influence one flop at a time and they don't like that.
They have massive wealth, power, and industry that all wants a piece of that pie. Each of those groups are going to do everything they can to keep the shekels rolling in.
They seem willing to burn it all down, rather than admit they're wrong and change direction to suit the actual tastes of the audience.
That's because the audience is not the customer. Blackrock/globalists/(((them))) are the customer. They are the ones dumping billions into studios like Disney after they put out flop after flop. A company that put out failed products at the rate that Disney has in the last 8 years would have gone under a long time ago without major injections of capital.
I've been wondering about that. How sustainable is Disney's financial model? It seems like they do nothing but lose money on cape-crap, but there seems to be no end of either new movies, series, etc. Is their merchandising really making them that much back? Something seems off, but not being privy to Disney's financial statements, I can't say for sure.
They're not a business they're a weapon in the culture war. Asking how sustainable they're business model is, is like asking what the ROI is on the 16th bullet in a magazine in a war.
You say that, but Robert McNamara actually tried to bean-counter his way through the Vietnam War.
The last time I checked the Disney parks were the only profitable part of Disney Corp. Their stock hasn't climbed past pre covid (though it had a giant spike during the lockdown) and their movies have been bombing a lot. Bob Iger got replaced as CEO this year by the guy who was in charge of the parks.
They are literally being kept afloat by Blackrock, and that's why they keep churning out globalist propaganda. Disney knows how to make money, they spent decades doing it. This is deliberate, and it has now consumed the company.
Disney is only staying afloat because of their parks and cruise line. Their media arm is a black hole that swallows money.
That's a fair point. So the propaganda will last forever, regardless of the monetary pluses and minuses. It's quite fascinating, in a sick, twisted sort of way.
At this point they know money is fake and they'll get however much they need of it despite their massive failings so long as they push the (((message)))
Rating sites as a concept are obsolete at this point. 30 years ago, the idea of 'the audience' as a whole either liking or not liking a movie was understandable and worked, because we had a monoculture and movies were designed as vehicles of entertainment first, messaging, if any, secondary. You could trust that an average of a pool of randoms on the street either liking or not liking something would give a pretty good impression on whether its good, or at least entertaining.
We don't have that anymore. Every piece of entertainment made now is made with messaging in mind first, and 'the audience' is now two very separate, distinct, and different groups; the left and right. Those two facts, messaging being the primary purpose of entertainment, and the two different audiences, combine to create a very notable outcome; everything is pre-filtered by which audience it is meant for before anyone sees even one second. Any movie that comes out, everyone knows 'this is for the left audience' or more uncommonly 'this is for the right audience', and the other audience doesn't even show up to begin with.
The only people going to see the movie or watch the show are the intended half of the audience, who are going to support it because it was made for them as a weapon to use against the other side. The Odyssey is a perfect example. It's made for the left audience, the left audience are the ones going to see it, and they are the ones who are going to rate it high whether they mean it or not because it is a weapon to use against the right. The right audience doesn't show up in the ratings because they didn't go see it in the first place. It wasn't for them.
Movies aren't made for everyone and then rated a 6/10 or a 8.5/10 from everyone anymore. They're made to be 10/10 for their half of the political war, and 0/10 for the enemy half of the war.
Bingo
Fify! Otherwise spot-on! And lately I think it's closer to 1/4 but that's by design. They want fanatical followers who will obey without question.
It's a bad system anyways. A 6/10 is considered "fresh". A 5.9 is considered "rotten". And then they take the average of their 1's and 0's, instead of the overall score.
A movie that has 90 10/10's, and 10 5/10's, will be sitting on a 90% fresh score (100 votes), while a movie with 100 6/10's will be sitting on a 100% fresh score (100 votes). The movie that in all likelihood is both objectively and subjectively the far superior movie, would have the worse score, because they have a dual-cutoff-scoreing system.
I fully believe The Odyssey could pull an almost unanimous 6/10, which would be 100% fresh, despite the cratered low score overall.
The system is fine. The point is to tell a potential moviegoer whether they'll like a movie or not. It's not to tell them whether a movie is great - a cult classic will get a low score on purpose, because a great movie with niche appeal isn't one that Joe Nobody is likely to enjoy.
“We know they are lying. They know they are lying. They know we know they are lying. We know they know we know they are lying. But they are still lying.”
I don't know about the unverified-only being a good metric either. People who would've used the site but now get notifications won't use the site anymore. All we can safely say is "real" number if somewhere between 56.2 and 96.6. One would assume closer to 56.2, but we'd need a sense of how to weight the scores.
Probably better to just consider RT numbers completely useless than trying to correct them somehow.
Edit: But comparing the pull scores to other movie's pull scores is still useful.
the people that work the movie places say it's all totally fake.
they were expecting sold out shows! all the tickets sold out!
call in all the help! we're gonna be so slammed this weekend!!!!!!!!!
crickets. showings with a whole 4 people. even tho it was "sold out".
movie places shitting bricks. they don't make jack on 'tickets'. and they don't sell overpriced popcorn and candy to invisible fake people...
this is all a faggoty fake woke battle they are pretending to win.
Behold the emperor’s new clothes. Aren’t they wonderful? Look, everyone else thinks they’re wonderful, so you’d better think they’re wonderful too, okay?
Its actually 0
Rotten tomatoes is a useless kosher site
How the hell does this movie even have 50% saying it’s decent?
If one didn't know or care about the drama behind it? It's likely a fairly good adventure story. Some folks will just remember the few good scenes and forget the dreck.