Techstuff Throws Rotten Tomatoes

a lot to me, Rotten Tomatoes. Now as I sit down to record this episode, that site is in the news and for those who aren't familiar with the website, Rotten Tomatoes is a site dedicated to film and television. It hosts entertainment news and previews, but it's best known as an aggregator for movie reviews. Lots of folks, including myself, use the site to get a quick feel for the

quality of a film. Movies have the fresh designation, those would be interesting and entertaining films, things that you would probably want to see. Then you have movies that have the rotten designation. They might still be entertaining, but not necessarily in the way the creators had intended it to

be anyway. In February twenty nineteen, Rotten Tomatoes made some headlines because some people were abusing the site's features in order to give an early negative review to the film Captain Marvel weeks before it was meant to come out. When groups of people coordinate this effort, it's called a review bomb, and it's usually meant to send a message or negatively affect a particular film or TV show or video games commercial performance, regardless of the actual quality of

the media itself. In response, Rotten Tomatoes has adjusted how they do things. More on that a bit later, but I thought it was time to dive into the history of the site. Where did it come from and what do those ratings actually mean? The Rotten Tomato story starts way back in nineteen ninety eight. Yep, the site is more than twenty years old, and it was the brainchild of a guy named Sen Duang, a creative design director, and he worked for a web design company called Design

Reactor in San Francisco, California. Besides being a web designer, Dwang was a big action film fan. He loved watching movies starring icons of the genre like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis, but he was also a really big fan of Asian stars like Jet Lee and Jackie Chan, who at that time had not yet managed to get much mainstream attention in the States. Then in nineteen ninety six, Jackie Chan's film Rumble in the Bronx

got a US release. That's a phenomenal film, by the way, if you have not seen it, highly recommended. I certify that one. Fresh awareness of Jackie Chan was on the rise, and Duang was curious about how American audiences at large would feel about the film, so he found himself checking

reviews and box office results for the movie. He also became a big fan of Ciskel and Ebert and their movie review show at the Movies Now for those youngsters out there, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were two famous film critics who worked at different newspapers in Chicago, and they hosted a few different television shows over the years in which they would discuss and review films, and they were famous for giving a movie either a thumb's up

recommendation or a thumbs down. Skipet Dewong decided he wanted to create a website dedicated to film reviews, and he originally thought about naming it Thumbs Up, but before long he changed his mind. Which was likely a good idea due to intellectual property reasons. He instead decided to see if rotten tomatoes was available, and it was, so he

went with that. Now. According to an oral history of rotten Tomatoes, which is hosted on the rotten Tomatoes blog at the rotten Tomatoes site, a film inspired Dwang to use that name. And I quote, the name rotten tomatoes came to send while watching the fantasy film Leolo, about a boy who imagines himself to be the offspring of an Italian peasant and a giant tomato end quote. And

maybe that's right. I mean, I'm sure the story came from Dwang himself, but it seems to me far more likely that the name rotten tomatoes is really just a reference to the old trope of an agitated audience hurling rotten vegetables a performers up on stage. Why anyone would bring rotten tomatoes in the first place is beyond me. Perhaps they were just hoping for a bad performance, or maybe it was just a way to deal with food waste, or maybe it was just a trope that never had

any real basis in reality. Anyway, to me, it just seems far more likely that the name was inspired by that idea instead of a fantasy film. And in fact, if you visit the Rotten Tomatoes site today and you look at how they aggregate their scores, you would see that they also reference this particular idea. Anyway, whatever the inspiration really was for the name, Dwang launched the site

on August eighteenth, nineteen ninety eight. Now, the earliest snapshot I could find on the Internet archive was for November twenty eighth, nineteen nine. The layout at that time was pretty simple. Down the middle of the page were news items about upcoming and newly released films. Down the left side, or along the left rail, as you might say in web design, you would find films that were recently released,

either in theaters or on home video. They were grouped together, and you would get the ones that were from that week, the previous week, and then two weeks and then three weeks before. A small red dot would designate a title as having the fresh rating the overall positive review score. The right rail had upcoming films listed both for cinemas and for home theater, and would also include trailers for

upcoming films. On the bottom right rail was a breakdown of the top ten films by box office in the United States. And I know what you're all thinking. You're thinking, Jonathan, you looked at the Rotten Tomatoes website for November twenty eight, nineteen ninety nine. What was the top performing film that week? Well, that would be The World Is Not Enough at James Bond film. The number ten film that week was being

John Malkovich. And I would argue the film number ten was superior to film number one, but that's just my own opinion. Now. From the beginning, the Tomato meter was an important tool. This is the rating that tells visitors if a movie has been deemed good or bad, or fresh versus rotten, though the percentage wasn't regularly shown against movie titles until a little bit later. So how does this formula actually work? Is a film that scores ninety percent twice as good as a film that scores forty

five percent? Are the films that have the dubious distinction of a zero percent score truly the worst movies ever made? Well, According to the founders, the formula for the Tomato Meter has remained pretty much constant since the site started. It's based on the percentage of positive reviews any given film,

or these days a television show will receive. So if you have one hundred critics and half of those critics give a film a positive review and the other half trash the movie, the Tomato Meter score should be fifty percent. But it gets a bit more nuanced when you take a closer look, which we will do after this short break. So how does the Tomato meter really work? Well, the type of positive review doesn't really matter when factoring the

Tomato Meters score. If as a critic you use some sort of five star system and you give a film three stars, you're essentially saying the movie is unremarkable. It's not terrible, but it's not great either. It's more good than bad, but maybe not overwhelmingly so. However, in the end, that counts as a positive review in the Tomato Meter standing it's either fresh or rotten. There are no degrees of freshness within a single review. It's only collectively that

you look at them. So if you see a movie and you give it a ten, and I see a movie and I give it a seven, both of those are considered positives. It doesn't matter that one is greater than the other. So using this formula, it's actually possible for an average film that isn't particularly interesting or entertaining to receive a one hundred percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. This doesn't mean that the film is a paragon of cinema. Instead, it means none of the critics that Rotten Tomatoes relies

upon the film a bad review. They might have all just said, eh, it's okay. But if they all said that, if every single critic said eh, it's okay, that still counts as a one hundred percent fresh score. Likewise, if more critics said this movie tried hard but ultimately failed, it might end up with a zero percent score. That doesn't mean it could go toe to toe with a movie like Plan nine from Outer Space or some other famously awful film to take the title of worst movie. Ever.

The percentage only tells you about the critical consensus surrounding the film, not whether or not the response was overwhelmingly positive or mediocre or overwhelmingly negative. You just don't know without reading the actual reviews. You could have a case where there are two films that are both more or less the same quality, however you would define that term. But one of those two movies had more critics say Eh, it was all right, and the other one had more

critics say this isn't worth your time. And the Tomato meter score might have you think that movie A, which gets say, a seventy percent score, is somehow twice as good as movie B, which has a thirty five percent score. But if you sat and watched both movies, you might walk away saying they were both pretty unremarkable. They weren't terrible, but they weren't great either. That's the limitation of the

Tomato meter formula. It's meant to give you a quick critical snapshot of a movie, not a detailed diagnosis of the film's actual quality. So a thirty percent film is not necessarily worse than a forty five percent. You have to look at the details. I should add that Rotten Tomatoes doesn't use every single movie review site or blog as a resource. The site has criteria to select critics and their reviews to factor into the Tomato Meter ratings.

The site also designates certain reviewers as top critics, people who have a built up history of film reviews and have received wide publication. There are also options for reviewers to upload their work directly into the Tomato Meter, they can give their films a score, perhaps a score out of ten, or even a letter grade like in school, like an AB or C or so on. To get a Tomatometer rating, a film or television show must receive

at least five reviews. If at least sixty percent of the reviews are positive, the reviewed content is considered fresh. If the Tomato Meter is at fifty nine percent or lower, then the respective media is rotten. In addition, if a film has at least five reviews from top critics and at least forty reviews if it's a film that's in limited release, or eighty reviews. If it's a film in wide release, and it has a Tomato Meter score of seventy five percent or higher, it is certified fresh, or

at least it qualifies for that designation. In actuality, a team of Rotten Tomatoes staffers have to look at those reviews and determine the likelihood that the movie or television show is going to remain at or above seventy five percent approval, And if they come to that conclusion that the title is pretty safe, that it's got a solid standing,

it gets the certified fresh rating. Rotten Tomatoes added the certified Fresh designation around two thousand and three, So I'm getting a little ahead of myself here, but I figured it just made more sense to group all the formula stuff together. In addition to the critics scores, Rotten Tomatoes also calculates an audience score based off user submitted ratings. More on that a bit later, as it's related to the problem that Rotten Tomatoes recently had to address now.

According to Dwong, he promoted his brand new site by going on to Usenet groups and sharing the link there, and he managed to attract one hundred whole visitors that first day. Not long after the first day, Yahoo promoted the site as site of the Day, and as someone who has had work promoted on Yahoo back in the day, this was a big deal. It boosted his visitor account considerably. Then the site was covered by USA Today and Netscape featured it on a landing page, and that really pushed

the numbers. Roger Ebert himself mentioned the site, and then it really was off to the races. Duang at the time was still working at Design Reactor, but he was finding it exhausting to do his job during the day and then work on Rotten Tomatoes every night, so he made a really big Leapes cided to quit his steady gig and concentrate full time on running the site. He also hired on two of his friends in nineteen ninety

nine to help him. One became the editor in chief for the site and another became the marketing director at least initially, and their headquarters was Dwang's apartment. Now at this point, he had moved from San Francisco back to Sacramento, California,

where rent was a little cheaper. Meanwhile, back at Design Reactor, Stephen Wong and Patrick Lee were interested in their former colleague's work, so they reached out to Duong and suggested that they actually join forces again and merge Rotten Tomatoes into Design Reactor directly and take up a new headquarters in Emeryville, California. And Dwang agreed, so they collectively hired on an outside company to do some design work for the site so that they weren't doing all of that

work themselves. Stephen Wong started to head up efforts to in corporate dynamic elements in the site design so that it wasn't just a static web page every time someone visited it. For those of you who don't remember the web. In the old web one point zero days, that was pretty common. You would go to a website and it was like a magazine page. There was no expectation that

the content was going to change day to day. This was an effort to move more to a web two point oh philosophy, where you have these dynamic elements that can change over time and give reason for people to come back to a site again and again. The new design also supported something that the old site had lacked, ad space. Until that happened, there was really no revenue model for the website. There's no way to make money now.

One thing the team had to deal with was the reaction from fans once the site began to feature advertising on it. Lots of people didn't like the site redesign, and they really hated that ads were starting to appear on the web pages. I've experienced this myself, and it is a bit tricky. After all, unless there is a way to make money from my work, I can't really devote time to that work because I still have to pay bills and stuff, and the alternatives to advertising tend

to be ones that people don't like very much. Like putting your stuff up behind a paywall. These days, a related model in which fans directly support the creators of the stuff they love has emerged, and some people can make a living off of that through platforms like Patreon. But that model doesn't work for everyone, particularly a full blown company that needs to have a more predictable revenue stream. Patrick Lee structured the company and he began to seek

out investment capital. He also took it upon himself to respond to people who were mad about the advertising that was appearing on the site. He said he found most people were much more reasonable once a human being reached out to them to acknowledge their concerns and complaints, and that it helped smooth things over. He said, people who had been flaming you earlier on with terrible language would apologize to you and then have a logical and calm conversation.

They just need to know that a human being was actually there to listen. Now, this was back in the pre dot com crash days, and at that time lots of investors were eager to get in on the action. Rotten Tomatoes didn't have much trouble securing investments. Patrick Lee's initial efforts raised a million dollars in funding. At this point, the Rotten Tomatoes staff numbered about twenty people. A couple of months later, it was up to twenty five people,

and the site was doing well. By January two thousand, it was receiving a quarter of a million unique visitors per day. But he hired Lily Chi to serve as the chief financial officer, and then the bottom fell out. By the bottom falling out, I don't mean that the CFO caused any problems. What I mean is the dot com crash happened. Now. I've done episodes of tech stuff about this era and about the dot com crash, and I go into it in great detail, but obviously I

don't want to do that here. I'll give a quick overview in just a moment. So what was the dot com crash? Cliffs notes. This was when the dot com industry, the Internet market suffered a massive market crash, and there were a lot of reasons for that market crash. It's a complicated subject. One of those reasons was that you had a lot of investors pouring millions of dollars, in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars into various startup

Internet companies in a sort of virtual gold rush. Everyone was trying to stake a claim on the incredible potential of the Internet. No one was really sure how it was going to pay off, but everyone was convinced it would pay off. However, many of those companies had no means of generating revenue. Some of them had no business

plan at all, just an idea. Others had a business plan, but they grew so fast, and they poured so much money into stuff like cool office space, that they spread themselves way too thin, way too quickly, and they encountered trouble. Investors began to lose confidence. People began to pull their money out of the market, and companies were disappearing left and right. And it wasn't just the investment money that was slowing down. Ad revenue became scarce as well. Advertisers

pulled back from the Internet. Now they weren't sure if the money they were spending would be a sound investment. If a website were to go out of business, then no one would see your advertising. That would just be money thrown away. Rotten Tomatoes was affected like many other companies.

The twenty five staff members got reduced down to eight and then down again to seven, and even those seven people saw their salaries go down by a third and then later on another cut, so that they were essentially making half of what they started with. Patrick Lee would reduce his own salary to nothing at all, as did Paul Lee, who at that point was the director of marketing,

and Patrick Lee tried to keep the business afloat. His goal was to ride out the storm and to return to profitability in order to provide investors a return on their investment. He was determined not to fail the people who had provided the company with funding, and according to Lee, he even at one point decided to move into the Rotten Tomatoes office because his biggest expense every month was rent, so why not cut out the rent and just move

into the company offices. He used a club that was in the same building and used their shower facilities, and he was known as being something of a neat freak, so he figured it wouldn't be that big a deal, just another interesting footnote in the Rotten Tomatoes history. Well, the company was actually able to survive because largely of

its investors. The funding round that raised one million dollars had closed just a couple of months before the market crash, so the timing was about as good as it possibly could be. With the crash right around the corner. The

company was flush with cash. Rotten Tomatoes had a little bit of a safety net in the form of that money, and the investors didn't compounding at the company's doors or demand changes in how the company was operating, and just let them go about their business, which really helped them

as well. The team was convinced that online was going to be the future for movie reviews, that more and more people were going to use the internet to look up review scores, they were going to transition from relying on things like the newspaper, and besides, Run Tomatoes would include links out to full reviews, giving moviegoers the option to read numerous critical analyzes of different films in the theaters, all from a centralized location. Everyone was sure the market

would eventually come around. The company just had to be able to survive until that actually happened. The small team tried to keep things light as the office was dealing with the stress of operating under these difficult circumstances. They would play video games. They held different parties. Their Halloween party was apparently something of a famous annual event, and there were a lot of stories about how most of the team was pretty awful at showing up in the morning.

Most people would filter in at eleven am or even noon. They even tried to create a financial incentive for people to show up on time to take regular business hours. They instituted the Pig, a piggy bank that people would have to contribute to whenever they showed up after ten am.

At the end of each month, the money in the pig would pay for a company meal, and apparently they had some pretty nice meals because people still didn't find a way to come in during normal office hours, though they would stay long enough to get all their work done. It wasn't that they were shirking their duties, they just weren't in the office at normal hours. The two thousand

crash had a long lasting effect. Even in two thousand and three, which is when Patrick Lee temporarily moved into the office, the company was still in a precarious position. Revenues had not been growing super fast, and the coffers were reduced a bit. The investment money was down to around half of what it had been. But these seven people on the team still believed in what they were doing, and their work was having an impact on the entertainment industry.

Even though Rotten Tomatoes is an aggregator, not a company that does its own movie reviews, it was seen as a huge marketing boost if a film had a high Tomato Meter score. Films that hit one hundred percent and stayed there for a while could find some pretty good box office performance, and films that had lower scores would see fewer ticket sales. So filmmakers started to develop a sort of love hate relationship with the company, and then

another company would come knocking. This company was IGN Entertainment, which, as the name suggests, was an entertainment website that was founded back in nineteen ninety six and it was mostly known for video game coverage. IGN issued a press release on June twenty ninth, two thousand and four, to announce the plan to acquire Rotten Tomatoes for a rumored ten

million dollars, though the amount was never formally announced. If so, that ten million dollars represented a nice payoff for the one million dollar investment that had been made back in two thousand. The team that had stuck by the site even as things were rough were vindicated Patrick Lee later said that the team had probably accepted an amount that was too low, but considering how hard they had worked and how challenging it was to generate revenue, they felt

it was the best choice at the time. Several of the core team members would leave the company over the course of the following year. Patrick Lee and Stephen Wong left in August two thousand and four to create a new site called Alive Not Dead. Several former Rotten Tomatoes employees would later go to join them. Lily Chi left in two thousand and five to become CFO of Lithium Technologies, which had an office space in the same building as

the Emeryville Rotten Tomatoes office. Sin Duang, the founder, stuck with Rotten Tomatoes a little longer, leaving in two thousand and seven. He went on to found a couple of other companies like moviesw butter dot com it's a movie news site where you can follow films in various stages of development, and wopular, a news aggregation site. Really big on the aggregating there. But our story doesn't end here. We've got a bit more to tell to get up

to present day. And this is a story I can really sympathize with IGN Entertainment takes the reins at Rotten Tomatoes in the summer of two thousand and four, and then stuff changes pretty quickly. Over just a few years, IGN would introduce new features to the site, including a

forum in which members could discuss films and reviews. They could talk about films within their own communities, so you could go to specific location based parts of the forum, and it made the site much more interactive than before. That's another element of that Web two point zero philosophy. Since its introduction, the site had had several redesigns, and

that continued as well. Over time, the site consolidated information about the film's box office standing, the total amount of money it had earned since its release, and how long it had been in theaters, and of course it's tomatometer's score. All of that got kind of consolidated into a single view. All right, now, it's time to talk a little bit about some corporate maneuvers, and trust me, as someone who has been through the process of acquisitions numerous times, these

things can matter a lot. In two thousand and five, news Core, Rupert Murdoch's media company, purchased IGN Entertainment. So at that point Rotten Tomatoes had a new corporate overlord. This would be just the beginning of some pretty massive changes, and I imagine each time it happened there was another cultural shift within the company. This always happens with mergers and acquisitions. But as I said, it was just the beginning. More after this short break, we're going to flash forward

now to twenty ten. So the site's been operating under news Corp. And IGN since two thousand and five. Twenty ten, the social networking site Flickster, which catered to movie fans, would swoop in and offer to buy Rotten Tomatoes from IGN and news Core was looking to refocus on the video game industry, and so the two sides reached an undisclosed agreement and Flickxter became the new parent company for

Rotten Tomatoes. We're still not done yet, though, So Rotten Tomatoes goes from independent website to part of IGN Entertainment, to being under Newscorep, to now being under Flixter. Just a year later, in twenty eleven, Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Group announced it would acquire Flickxter, and Rotten Tomatoes would go along. For the ride. The financial details of this

acquisition were also undisclosed. However, contemporary reports valued Flixster at between sixty million and ninety million dollars, So now Rotten Tomatoes has a new new overlord. The acquisition raised some

eyebrows in the online journalism community. It seemed a pretty strong candidate for a conflict of interest because Warner Brothers makes films and television programs owning a site for hosting reviews that the company would need to tread carefully to avoid charges that it was fixing the game, and honestly, it seemed like stuff was on the up and up. This became pretty darn clear when Batman Versus Superman Dawn of Justice came out. The film did not get a

very good score. Currently, the score is at twenty seven percent, meaning it is designated as being well and truly rotten. Though again, remember that just means the number of negative reviews. It doesn't tell you how negative those reviews were. Some DC fans got angry at Rotten Tomatoes and petitioned to have it shut down, though I don't know who in the world would have done that. Here's the thing, Batman

Versus Superman was a Warner Brothers Pictures film. At the time of its release, Rotten Tomatoes was still owned in part by Warner Brothers Entertainment, so clearly there wasn't some sort of shell game going on here. Not to mention that Rotten Tomatoes is an aggregator. While the site uses its formula to determine if a film is fresh or rotten,

it doesn't actually review the films itself. It's not the site's fault if movie critics don't like a film, and likewise it's not the site's credit if critics love a film, but angry fans didn't care very much about the facts. They wanted the films they liked to get good reviews, even if those films weren't, you know, good, and this wouldn't be the last time that fans and Rotten Tomatoes

would clash. Lots of foreshadowing in this episode. Also Brett Ratner, the filmmaker and one of the financiers behind Batman Versus Superman, criticize Rotten Tomatoes, calling it quote the worst thing that we have in today's movie culture. End quote. Now, I would argue there are far worse things in movie culture,

like the rampant cases of sexual harassment. But hey, Brett Rattner. However, his real point is one I actually agree with, and that was that the Rotten Tomatoes score was being misused. It was being used as a measure of overall film quality, and as I've already said on this episode, that's not really accurate. So while I do not agree with mister Rattner that Rotten Tomatoes is the worst thing in Hollywood, I do agree that a lot of people rely on

Rotten Tomatoes without fully understanding it. It really just tells you if more critics thought a film was good, or if they thought it was bad, not the relative goodness or badness of it. Now, maybe that's splitting hairs, but I think it's an important designation. Not long after the Batman Versus Superman debacle, Rotten Tomatoes changed hands yet again. The ticketing company Fandango acquired Flickster and Rotten Tomatoes, with

Warner Brothers receiving a thirty percent stake in Fandango. The other seventy percent of the company belongs to Fandango's parent company, NBC Universal Media, which in turn is owned by Comcast. Once again, a media company owns Rotten Tomatoes. Now, like I said at the top of this episode. Recently, there was another audience brew haha that brought Rotten Tomatoes back

into the news. This time it was about Captain Marvel and a review bombing campaign and a seemingly weird interpretation of what the film's star Brie Larson had said about press tours that she was going on. Larson had said she had noticed her press tours had her meeting with journalists who were nearly always white men, so she wanted to make sure her press tours had a greater diversity represented at them. Now, some people interpreted this to mean she did not want white men at her press tours,

but Larson herself dismissed that. She said she wasn't arguing that people should be taken off the tour that she would not meet with certain journalists because they happened to be white men. Instead, she said more people needed to be added into the tour so that there was greater representation. She wanted to see greater diversity, but not at the

cost of those who are already there. However, some fans took this to mean brite Larson hates white men, and I'm a white man, so I hate Captain Marvel even though the movie isn't out yet, and then the review bombing began. Rotten Tomatoes has now decided that users will not be able to post comments on films that aren't out yet. And you might think, well, that makes sense.

Why were they doing it before, And it's because Rotten Tomatoes was allowing for anticipation scores, this idea of how anticipated is this film or people looking forward to seeing it, but it's been misused. According to the official blog quote, we are disabling the comment function prior to a movie's release date. Unfortunately, we have seen an uptick in non constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling, which we believe is

a disservice to our general readership. We have decided that turning off this feature for now is the best course of action. End quote. Personally, I think this is a good move. I think it's unfair to judge any film

before you've actually seen it. Call me crazy that way. Now, it may turn out that Captain Marvel is an absolute stinker of a movie and it deserves bad reviews, but we should at least watch the film first before we come to that conclusion and maybe have a better reason for disliking the movie than misinterpreting deliberately or otherwise an

actor's comment about press tours. There are other examples of people misusing Rotten Tomatoes in various ways, and it's not always a method of review bombing a movie to give it a negative review. There's also an example of potential

review bombing to try and improve a film's score. There was the famous case of the film Gottie starring John Travolta, a movie that had near universal critical negative reviews, but a group of positive reviews hitting suspiciously close together suggested that there might have been a concentrated, coordinated campaign to change the score with people who had been either involved with the movie or connected to the movie in some way, or perhaps even paid off mafia style by the film, which,

if you're asking me, gets a little meta with the subject matter, and then I kind of respect, but it's still gaming the system. So it's good to see that Rotten Tomatoes is responding to that in this way. Other big changes may be following soon, and by the time you hear this, they may even be in place. There's a rumor that pretty soon, if you wish to leave a movie review as a user, you will have to first authenticate that you purchased a ticket to that movie,

presumably through Fandango. I don't know if you'll be able to leave a review if you bought your ticket through some other service, but you have to prove that you've actually seen the film, or at least bought a ticket to the film. And honestly, if people buy tickets to movies, that's what the executives really care about. It's nice if people like your movie. If you're an executive, it means that more people might go and see the film. But ultimately,

the ticket sales are what matters. If I have footed the bill for a movie to be made, I'm going to be happy if a lot of people go and buy tickets to that film. Well, that wraps up this episode about Rotten Tomatoes and its history, as well as how the tomato meter works. I hope you guys have a greater understanding of what Rotten Tomatoes is and how

it impacts the industry. It actually tends to have a pretty big impact these days, to the point where you hear some movie executives really complain about how a score can dramatically affect the performance of a film. Personally, I think film quality dramatically impacts the performance, but I could see how a really bad or really good score could sway an audience. I've certainly skipped movies because of the

low scores. If you guys have suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, hey, why not let me know about them. One way you can do so is to write me. The address for the show is tech stuff at how stuffworks dot com, or you can pop on over to our website that's tech Stuff podcast dot com. That's where you're gonna find links to our social media presence where we present things on social media. You will also find

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