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