It’s not uncommon that Film Twitter types will point to Rotten Tomatoes‘ Audience Score — the critic aggregator’s “Popcornmeter” — and say that the discrepancy between it and the critic score on the Tomatometer is a sign of movie critics’ disconnect from the general public. That’s misguided for a few reasons, but also because an audience score can be so easily manipulated. People can vote however they want, and sometimes you get instances of fans review bombing a title, sometimes without having even seen it.
Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango today though are rolling out a new rating that could address that and give truly popular movies a much needed word-of-mouth boost. It’s called “Verified Hot.”
The designation is only given to theatrical movies that have reached an audience score above 90 percent among user ratings. The catch is, the “verified” tag only counts users who Rotten Tomatoes know actually bought a ticket to the movie.
Movie ticketing app Fandango is the parent company to Rotten Tomatoes, so if you bought your ticket through Fandango and then rated a movie using that same user info on Rotten Tomatoes, RT is able to confirm you bought a ticket and can filter out anyone else who may just be rating things blindly. A rep for RT tells IndieWire the goal is to work with other partners so that other people who don’t use Fandango can still be considered verified.
So far, Rotten Tomatoes says movies from this summer that have qualified for the new honor include “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” “Deadpool & Wolverine,” “Twisters,” “It Ends With Us,” and more. Over 200 other older films dating back to 2019 retroactively are also getting the tag, including films like “Top Gun: Maverick,” “The Color Purple,” “Parasite,” “Oppenheimer,” “Dune: Part Two,” “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” and more. The full list of Verified Hot titles is here.
Rotten Tomatoes also expanded its Popcornmeter designations. Anything with an audience score above 60 percent of people rating it as 3.5 stars or higher will be labeled “Hot,” and movies below that 60 percent threshold are now “Stale.”
The “Certified Fresh” badge for movies that achieve a strong enough critics score has been around for a while, but in 2020 RT introduced a “Top Critics” feature such that you could filter out the dozens or hundreds of aggregated critics from unreliable sources who could be skewing a film’s score. Anyone can vote or rate movies on Rotten Tomatoes if you’re an audience member, but you can also filter out ratings from those not considered “verified.”
Rotten Tomatoes made some other tweaks too under the hood: Both the Popcornmeter and Tomatometer need to meet a new minimum number of reviews published for a score to appear. Not everything gets reviewed widely, so the threshold varies depending on a film’s total projected domestic box office forecast.
“On Rotten Tomatoes, fans love to consult our verified audience score, in addition to the Tomatometer critics’ score, when discovering new movies and deciding what they want to watch next,” said Amanda Norvell, SVP, Direct-to-Consumer Services at Fandango. “With the addition of Verified Hot, we are excited to celebrate and shine a spotlight on the theatrical films that fans have unanimously embraced and have taken the time to share their incredible moviegoing experience with other fans.”
