I read an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal about how important the Rotten Tomatoes movie rating site is to movie studios.

The story says a lot of the movie types find Rotten Tomatoes unfair in that it reduces

approval down to one number, which actually is one of the charms turning positive and negative reviews into one percentage number overall.

I do find some reviews critical that still end up making recommendations, and some

reviews on the rotten side are not that bad. Overall, it works great.

My beef with the site has to do with movie critics. They tend to like “artsy” films

better than moviegoers and action films and lighthearted movies less.

What the story doesn’t say is that the Tomatoes has an antidote to that.

They also post the reviewer score next to the moviegoers score. It is very interesting.

A fun flawed movie might be 50 on the rotten scale but 70 for the people who went to see the movie.

I also find that if critics rate a movie much higher than the fans, it tends to be talky, slow, long and sometimes weird. Critics love that shit, that is their job and they have all the time in the world.

If you use Tomatoes to decide on a movie, beware of movies rate much lower by fans than by the critics. And if the fans rate much higher, you might enjoy it, particularly those of you who are Kevin Hart fans.