When you work at Rotten Tomatoes, you don’t just tell people what you do for a living—you admit it. Or confess it. Sometimes, depending on the type of person you’re speaking to, you take a big step back, away from the line of fire. Because you know what’s coming next.
For me, what comes next usually involves The Greatest Showman, the mega-hit musical from 2017 starring Hugh Jackman that audiences love but that our Tomatometer deems Rotten. “How could you call that a bad movie?” an Uber driver once barked at me. “Do you even have a soul?!” Or, upon confessing what I do, I might suddenly find myself confronted with an animated defense of Michael Bay’s Bad Boys, a movie whose Rotten 42% score was enough to once prompt a partygoer to lecture me for ten minutes about the out-of-touch-ness of our critics. Another time, a Step Brothers fan told me bluntly, upon hearing where I worked, that “we’re not going to be friends.” (The movie has a Rotten Tomatometer score of 55%; just five more points and we might have been besties.)
If they happen to bring up Venom, I just make a run for it.
I rarely get a word in during these exchanges, but when I do, I tell them this: I hear you. All of us at Rotten Tomatoes do. The Tomatometer*—which shows the percentage of critics who like a movie or TV show enough to recommend it—can drive us crazy, too.
Sometimes we’re with it all the way, allowing it to guide us to the latest well-oiled blockbuster or point the way toward an underground masterpiece we wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. But other times, it knocks the wind out of us. We feel your pain when an upcoming film we’re dying to see gets a Rotten score (which is anything below 59%), and it can totally lay us out when we discover that a movie we’ve loved for years has been wearing the big green splat all this time. When I first found out that critics at the time mostly hated my favorite Christmas movie, Home Alone 2: Lost In New York (Rotten at 32%!), I had to ask: Do they even have souls?
Exchanges and discoveries like these brought us to the subject of our very first Rotten Tomatoes book: Rotten Movies We Love. Why did we decide to start with a tome in honor of the Rotten and not the Fresh? Because we understand your passion (we’re fans, too). As much as we love movies that score 90% or higher, we, like you, also love movies that don’t always connect with critics or movies whose virtues are best revealed with age. We love dumb comedies, and we laugh at any and all fart jokes. (At least I do.) Our desks are covered in toys and postcards and other tchotchkes from critically maligned films that would become cult classics. And we love a well-executed jump scare, regardless of whether it adds value to the story. Some of us—though not many—even loved The Greatest Showman.
In this book, we make the case for why we love these “Rotten” movies. For digestion’s sake, we’ve grouped this list of 101 Rotten movies into seven categories, each of which hint at the reasoning you’ll find within: popular favorites that dominated the box office or found love on TV and in home entertainment (but not with critics); weird and wonderfully Rotten sci-fi and fantasy; rare Rotten films from Fresh and famous directors; movies that were panned at release but found a cult following; underestimated titles that were doing a little more than reviewers gave them credit for at the time; oft-dismissed sequels we think deserve a second look; and dumb-fun flicks that just make us laugh, scream, or get our hearts racing.
Some movies straddle multiple categories: Rocky IV was a box office smash, a sequel dismissed far too quickly, and a super-interesting critique of US nationalism during the Cold War (really); The Cable Guy was a severely underestimated satire that still pulled off some big stupid laughs on its way to becoming a cult classic. All have inspired enough passion in the Rotten Tomatoes’ staff for us to stand up, turn toward the Tomatometer, and declare our love for the green stuff.
Passion is an appropriate driver for our first book, as it was passion that got Rotten Tomatoes started some twenty-one years ago. Cofounder Senh Duong had grown up a big fan of Chinese actors/ass-kickers Jackie Chan and Jet Li, and when Chan released his first big US crossover film, Rumble in the Bronx, Duong wondered what critics would make of it. The Berkeley undergrad was searching for reviews of Chan movies he loved—among them First Strike and Twin Dragons (both of which would be Rotten when the site eventually launched)—when the idea for a review aggregator came to him. He founded the site a few years later, on August 18, 1998, with two other Berkeley students, Patrick Y. Lee and Stephen Wang.
The idea was simple: create a pool of critics who meet a set of criteria (professionals with experience and an audience); collect their reviews when a movie is released; and calculate the percentage of reviews that recommend the movie. That percentage would be its “Tomatometer” score.
Rotten Tomatoes has evolved a lot since those early days in the Bay Area, but that basic calculation remains the same. We’re bigger now, of course, and we cover TV. (Want a Tomatometer score for every episode of Game of Thrones? We got you.) We also put on live shows where you can debate critics in the flesh, and we produce a ton of original content—everything from celebrity interviews to the thing you’re holding in your hand right now.
We’ve also updated how we source and approve the people who contribute to our critic pool, with a big refresh in 2018 that made it easier for freelance critics, those working in newer media (think YouTubers, podcasters), and those speaking to underrepresented groups to join the ranks. Our Tomatometer hasn’t changed, but the opinions that contribute to it have evolved with the times.
Critics have been as core to our evolution as our own passion for movies; it’s their Fresh or Rotten opinions on which the RT foundations stand. We couldn’t celebrate Rotten movies we love without asking some critics to tell us theirs. And so, mixed in with our own selections of fantastic Rotten films, you’ll find impassioned defenses of Rotten films from some of the world’s most talented and thoughtful reviewers. They’re names you know and names you should make a point of seeking out.
The incredible Leonard Maltin, whose yearly movie guides have been helping us decide what to watch since 1969, endorses what some consider one of the worst movies ever made, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. It was an embarrassment for the legendary Lugosi but an enduring source of pleasure for the veteran critic. Rolling Stone’s David Fear, meanwhile, asks us to take a second look at The Usual Suspects writer Christopher McQuarrie’s directorial debut The Way of the Gun, arguing that it’s so much more than the Tarantino rip-off most dismissed it as back in 2000. UK magazine Empire’s editor-in-chief, Terri White, sets the page on fire in a wonderful and galvanizing new look at 1996’s teen-witch flick The Craft, which itself attempted to set the patriarchy alight. And Time Out New York’s Joshua Rothkopf proves that Will Ferrell can put a smile on even the most seasoned of critics’ faces—if he lands those fart jokes just right. Rothkopf’s ode to the unrelenting and totally winning stupidity of Step Brothers is a delight.
One critic even pitches a tent in support of The Greatest Showman, albeit in a much more reasoned manner than my hostile Uber driver. In a true highlight, Kristen Lopez wrestles with the P. T.Barnum bio-musical’s problems (primary among them a glossing-over of the circus impresario’s treatment of those with disabilities) even as she finds herself won over by its charms (those songs, that glitz, that glam!). Lopez, who herself is disabled, brings a fascinating perspective, contemplating what to do with a piece of cinema you love when you know it’s been made without you in mind.
Lopez’s moving piece gets to the heart of why we’re putting this book out into the world. “Fresh” and “Rotten” are really just starting points. There’s a lot that goes into those scores—thousands of opinions, millions of words spoken and written, thoughtful curation, and eventually some pretty simple math. But they can’t account for things like audience sentiment and the way culture and perceptions of a movie might change over time. In the end, though, that big green splat and that perfect-looking red tomato are there as much to guide your viewing choices as they are to start a conversation about what you’ve just seen.
Fresh or Rotten isn’t the final word on a film; it’s often the first word, a kickoff to a debate about whether the critics got it right or wrong, and—in these pages particularly—whether time might have changed the answer to that question. And it’s an invitation to tell us what you think. The more voices join the conversation, the more fun and dynamic that conversation is; the experience of watching a movie is enriched by the thoughtful and insightful discussion that follows.
We hope this book gets you talking.
Joel Meares
Editor-in-Chief, Rotten Tomatoes