This is why we can’t have nice things.
America’s tedious and exhausting culture war has been fought on many fronts over the years; Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates movie and television reviews, is apparently the newest one. Right-wingers have noticed that there is a difference between reviews by professional critics and self-reported ones by audience members. This has never happened before.
Rotten Tomatoes has been a useful resource for moviegoers since 1998, when it launched. Initially it indexed reviews from professional critics at a wide variety of outlets, expressing them as a score ranging from “Fresh” to “Rotten.” The site now also allows users to leave their own reviews, which are expressed on the same scale.
Over the past few years, this has attracted political actors—especially right-wing ones—to the site to review big pop culture events like Marvel movies. This is a part of a broader cottage industry. Weirdos on YouTube, for example, make dozens of videos about the box office numbers of Marvel movies with non-white, non-male leads in order to make a central point about how being “woke”—i.e. making movies starring people who aren’t white men—leads to poor box office numbers. (This is not consistently true.)
This week, that cultural miasma has spilled out beyond just the nerd sphere, as Fox News and The Federalist have both noted that there are big differences between the professional and amateur reviews of two recent productions. Fox notes that although the critics aggregated on Rotten Tomatoes do not like Dave Chapelle’s new special The Closer, “more than 1,000 ratings collected by the site have given it a 96% audience score.” The Federalist’s target is a National Geographic documentary about Dr. Anthony Fauci. The publication, previously noted for allowing an unlicensed dermatologist to suggest people throw coronavirus parties, says that “the Tomatometer, expressing the views of ordained critics, offers a 94 percent positive rating compared to just 2 percent of the general audience who gave similar praise.”
