www.RottenTomatoes.com

Rotten Tomatoes: Online Movie Reviews

The management at Rotten Tomatoes provides the following explanation for naming the website rottentomatoes.com - "Back in the days of the open theaters, when a play was particularly atrocious, the audience expressed their dissatisfaction by not only booing and hissing at the stage, but throwing whatever was at hand -- vegetables and fruits included. Hence the name Rotten Tomatoes".

Rotten Tomatoes is the resource of movie reviews, whether it's the latest sci-fi mindbender, visual effects romp, or intimate and personal character-driven independent film, you can find reviews of all movies over here. RottenTomatoes.com organizes and collects all of the reviews from a variety of sources such as newspapers, online, magazines, etc., and then averages those reviews into a single score.

The website claims that over 7 million readers each month use RottenTomatoes.com globally as a dependable, objective resource for coverage of movies and DVD. According to them - "With more than 250,000 titles and 850,000 review links in its ever-growing database, RT offers a fun and informative way to discover the critical reaction on movies neatly summarized via the Tomatometer".

RottenTomatoes.com gathers reviews from a set pool of sources; either by checking their sites or by having the critics or webmasters submits the reviews to rottentomatoes.com. Usually, when a movie opens (normally Friday mornings by 8:00 a.m. (PST)) - rottentomatoes.com lists the reviews from Approved Tomatometer Critics. If you want to read a review from a critic who is not counted toward the tomatometer, select "All Film Reviews" from the drop down menu above the cast names and just below the movie title.

The Approved Tomatometer Critics are critics that fit within a set of standards - mostly from accredited media outlets and online film societies. You can click here to view their criteria. They use the same list of critics to evaluate each movie to insure that the Tomatometer is consistent and unbiased.

The Tomatometer measures the percentage of Approved Tomatometer Critics who recommend a certain movie -- or the number of good reviews divided by the total number of reviews. In order for a movie to receive an overall rating of Fresh, the reading on the Tomatometer for that movie must be at least 60%. Otherwise, it will be termed as Rotten.

• A fresh red tomato denotes a good review.
• A rotten squashed green tomato denotes a bad review.