Imagine this: You and I are trying to decide on a movie together, and we are scrolling through some streaming service, and I see a 90s thriller movie that has an eye-catching description and looks like it would be a fun watch. So I suggest we see it, and you take out your phone and open Rotten Tomatoes. Obviously, Rotten Tomatoes gives it an unsatisfactory score, and you convince me that we shouldn’t see it. So we don’t.

If we had dug a little deeper (in fact, only gone as far as the movie’s Wikipedia page), we would have seen that the movie made itself a decent amount of money—not just in theaters, but in the home video market as well. During a time before Rotten Tomatoes, many would be happy to watch this movie.

So, what happened? 

Film criticism has changed since the rise of the internet, but I’d argue that nothing has changed it quite like Rotten Tomatoes. Rotten Tomatoes has become one of the most common ways for people to decide if they want to see a movie, having both a Tomatometer and an audience score. Since the audience score is subject to various factors, we will focus mainly on the critics, who have to cover a variety of movies for what they are.

The most important thing to understand about the Tomatometer is that it merges magazine critics and blog critics into that one nebulous mass known as “the critics.” A famous critic for The New York Times has just as much power as a blogger who meets the minimum requirements needed to get approved by the site (and all you technically need is a consistent review output for a minimum of two years and work that reflects Rotten Tomatoes’ “key values”). Both influence the same score that over a third of moviegoers turn to when deciding whether to watch a movie. 

Back in the 1990s, people didn’t have Rotten Tomatoes (it was founded in 1998 but not popular until after the millennium). Instead, they relied on individual critics whose taste aligned with their own. To be a critic who could exert any influence over moviegoers, you had to do two things: be talented enough to get hired by a magazine and share a similar taste with a large enough audience. 

Critics had to be passionate enough about movies to make that their entire job. They weren’t just offering criticism as a hobby. They had to be talented enough to make it into a magazine, and they had to care enough to stay there (especially since the pay was not great).  

Critics gave their (hopefully) honest opinions and hoped these ideas would resonate. Obviously, famous critics had their own ways of describing movies and convincing people to give them a shot, but the Ebert and Siskel thumbs up/thumbs down system and Leonard Maltin’s brief two sentence TV guide reviews showed that sharing taste was all you needed to exert influence.

This sounds like a very populist way of viewing film criticism, but it’s the reverse. This concept of a movie critic implies that the critic’s opinions don’t coincide with everyone’s or else there wouldn’t need to be movie critics plural—there could just be one. There are and should be different critics with different opinions, whose views are meant for very different audiences.

It is easy to see how Rotten Tomatoes ruins that. If the critics are all lumped together, suddenly there is a website acting like we all share the same taste. It is easy to trick yourself into thinking that the system is working, particularly if you have no notion of how it worked before, or you didn’t have to worry about a hit or miss website deciding everything for you. 

It is no coincidence that I chose the period of the 1990s and the thriller genre to reflect upon. These thrillers in the 1990s were often erotic and were not mainstream in their content or appeal. Scroll through the Rotten Tomatoes website, and it is easy to find both contemporary bloggers who felt very uncomfortable watching these films with their parents and critics from that time period who viewed these types of movies as trashy and embarrassing.

I want to look closer at one of these Rotten Tomatoes scores to see which critics gave the movie a positive review and which critics did not. “Guilty As Sin” has only 16 critics’ reviews. Of these, the only big names with established audiences are Roger Ebert, Owen Gleiberman, and James Berardinelli (who is actually a blogger, just one with a very big audience and one who Roger Ebert himself referred to as “the best of the web-based critics”). Ebert and Gleiberman both praised the story, while Berardinelli did not like it. If you agreed with Berardinelli most of the time, then this movie probably wouldn’t have been for you. However, if you agreed with the other two (and trust me, many people did), then the movie might be worth checking out. 

I have seen “Guilty As Sin” and loved it. It moves quickly, and I guarantee you that people would have shown up to the movie theater if Roger Ebert told them to. Maybe I am biased; I liked all three of these thrillers a lot. The erotic thriller is a famously dead genre and just googling the phrase “erotic thriller dead” pulls up many articles discussing why it disappeared in the first place.

However, I think we wouldn’t have seen the genre disappear if more people watched the movie “Passion” from 2012. 

I can’t lie. “Passion” is not perfect.  The first 20 minutes of “Passion” are fine, albeit a bit boring. However, if you can make it through those first 20 minutes, you are left with an 80 minute reward waiting for you: an incredibly sleek and modern thriller that has no interest in ever losing any suspense at all. The movie is a clear descendent of the erotic thriller genres of the 1990s in its overt eroticism between characters that should not be having sex with one another. You didn’t question it. You didn’t analyze. You just enjoyed it for what it was.

Despite this (or perhaps because of it), “Passion” earned a 34 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and made only 1.3 million back on its 25 million dollar budget. Yet, when you actually look at its Rotten Tomatoes score, you can see that A.O. Scott, Craig Seligman, and (coincidentally enough) a critic handpicked by Roger Ebert for his website rogerebert.com really liked the movie. These are very successful critics: the type who used to matter. The type who could swing reception to a thriller another way entirely. But with Rotten Tomatoes now ruling the movie review landscape, thousands of people who would have enjoyed the movie may have missed out on it. 

By the way, if it sounds like the erotic thriller is a genre already built for your taste, I have good news: Hollywood is making them again. It seems there are more erotic thrillers being released today than ever before. “Babygirl” has a plot that actually reminds me of “Passion” and is directed and written by Halina Reijn, who also directed “Bodies Bodies Bodies.” That one comes out in December. When they each come out, I will be checking out their reviews, but only the important ones. Like one from Owen Gleiberman.

 

Henry Kaplan is a member of the class of 2028 and can be reached at hrkaplan@wesleyan.edu.