This Tomato Stinks

So a few weeks ago I’m reading through the Washington Post and I see an ad for “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” that says, “Best Reviewed Movie of the Year*”. I thought this sounded odd, and noticed the asterisk that pushed me toward a note at the bottom of the ad that suggested this information came from Rotten Tomatoes. For those of you who don’t know, Rotten Tomatoes is a website that compiles film reviews from across the country and then determines a “tomato rating” for each film based on the # of positive vs. negative reviews the movie received. I like to read Rotten Tomatoes all the time, as it’s a great resource to get a lot of reviews without having to search a bunch of different websites.

So I went to Rotten Tomatoes to see for myself if “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” (known as “TFYOV” for the remainder of this blog) really was the best reviewed movie of 2005. If one searches on 2005 movies, you come a page that shows that “TFYOV” is #42 as far as best reviewed movies go in 2005. So I thought, how in the world can Universal Studios state in their ad that Rotten Tomatoes says that “TFYOV” is the best reviewed movie of 2005? This was a job for the Movie Answer Man.

The Movie Answer Man is a popular column by Roger Ebert in which he pretty much answers questions about movies. (Ingenious, no?) Most questions deal with questions on a movie, historical trivia, or even questions that only the director of the movie can answer, and Ebert usually gets that director to answer. So I emailed my question to Rog, and lo and behold, he printed it. You can find my question and his response by clicking here (it’s the 2nd question down). Actually, the response isn’t from Ebert, but from Universal Studios, who basically states that they are able to use Rotten Tomatoes as a source for their quote because Rotten Tomatoes actually issued a news report stating this to be the case.

After a quick search of Rotten Tomatoes website, I found their press release. As you can see, they state that, as of August 19, “TFYOV” is the best reviewed WIDE RELEASE movie of the year. So there’s the caveat. Now granted, many of the 41 movies ahead of “TFYOV” are very small, independent movies that aren’t even playing in the Washington, DC area. However, there are SEVERAL very popular and very good movies ahead of “TFYOV” in the 2005 rankings. “March of the Penguins” has a tomato rating of 94%, and has made over $70 million. Just because it wasn’t a wide release seems silly to “discount” that movie when it’s obviously considered a better reviewed movie. “Millions” is another movie ranked higher than “TFYOV”, at 89%. But because it was only released into 5 theaters it’s first weekend (even though it expanded to 340 at its peak) that also is enough to discount the movie in Rotten Tomatoes’ rankings.
All of this sounds awfully stinky to me. It’s almost as if RT wanted to release a statement saying “TFYOV” was the #1 movie of the year, and then worked backwards to determine how they could say it was #1. “Okay, if we discount all documentaries, and all independent movies, and any movie that didn’t have a wide studio release…hey, I think we’ve got something here!” It also seems very fishy to me that Universal was able to then use this in their ads. When you think about it, why would RT have released a press release like this? Maybe they knew, or even had a deal with Universal in order to use this in their advertisements. Either way, it stinks, and both Universal and RT deserves to be splat with a tomato for their deceptive advertising practices.