I just saw the reply by someone else, in another thread
“And it has a 93% on the popcorn meter!”
… like that’s really gonna sway me either way. 
I just read those types of comments and I can’t help but think: “Who GIVES a shit??”
Do most of you really put that much faith in RottenTomatoes?
More on the other side of the meter. If a movie is below 40%, probably not worth wasting any time on it.
But just because a movie is over 90% doesn’t mean it is for me.
Faith? No, but it influences me to go to the site and check out what reviewers say, both professional and amateur.
Exactly this.
If a movie is a topic/genre which interests me, and it has a high RT score, that indicates a pretty good chance that I’ll enjoy it. But, I probably won’t go see a movie, solely because it has a high score on RT; I’ll also read reviews and see what friends of mine have to say about it.
But, if it’s a topic/genre that doesn’t interest me (e.g., romcom, historical drama, a vehicle for certain actors I don’t like), all a really high RT score tells me is that “it’s probably a very good movie, for its genre, but that doesn’t mean I’ll like it.”
And, a low RT score is a pretty good indicator that it’s a dog, regardless of genre. If it’s a movie that I was interested in, prior to its release (and reviews generating its RT score), I might try to learn more, to see if what’s causing its bad score is something that’s likely to make me find it unenjoyable. FWIW, I don’t generally enjoy “it’s so bad, it’s good!” movies.
I’ll look at the critic consensus and read a couple of them, I put no stock in the audience score.
I find it a useful data point, yes.
Fresh on RT means a B- or better from at least 60% of reviewers. Pretty low bar. Why wouldn’t you give the site a quick check so that you don’t waste a lot more time? Great RoI.
Audience scores are meaningless, though.
Also, there’s a known phenomenon in the RT “Popcorn” (audience) score, in which people who haven’t even seen the film spam the RT site to vote, one way or the other, either to support a film which they feel is important or matches their ideology, or to attempt to torpedo a film which has angered them (even if they will never actually go see the film).
I’ve seen smaller films, made to support a conservative or evangelical Christian message, which get lousy reviewer scores in RT, and were barely placed into distribution, but still receive massive Popcorn scores.
I care about both. Mind you, neither will change my mind, but it is nice to get validation.
Also if someone says “everyone hated (or loved) that film” a check of the two rating can confirm or refute that. Mind you- it cant refute personal opinions, of course. But if someone says “The film was horrible, widely hated (say the Star Wars Prequels) you can show it was not widely hated or considered horrible.
I can also check out films i might want to see.
Like what the others said, it’s common for movies with an A rating or 90% to be lousy anyway somehow. But it’s very rare for a movie with a 40% F rating to be surprisingly good.
When I was younger, I saw some real dogs in the theater, including Ishtar, Nightfall (1988), and Highlander II: The Suckening [sic].
(One of the two critic review summaries for Nightfall [based on the famous Asimov story], consists of “Do not ever rent this film.”)
After the debacle that was Highlander II (which I actually saw on opening night because I was a big fan of the first movie), I vowed that I would never waste my time on a movie—especially in the theater—without checking the reviews first.
When Rotten Tomatoes came along, it made that so much easier.
With that said, I have found in recent years that my tastes have diverged from the RT consensus, though. For example, in 2023, I went to see Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One mainly based its 96% rating, but I thought it sucked. Previously, Man of Steel (2013) got a 57% rating, but I liked it. Whereas the latest Superman (2025) movie got a 83%, but I disliked it.
So it’s not a perfect guide for me. Nevertheless, if a movie gets uniformly terrible reviews, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to like it either, and certainly won’t see it in the theater.
I don’t really like RT, finding their rating system counter intuitive. If a movie gets a 95% rating, that doesn’t mean that the average critic rating is very high. It means that 95% of the critics found the movie generally positive, even if just barely above mediocre. If every critic gave a movie 3.5/5 stars, that would be a 100% rating, not a 70%… they don’t find the average/mean review score, but the % of “thumbs up” vs “thumbs down” scores.
I prefer the Cinemascore system, where they exit poll opening day moviegoers on an A to F scale: What is a CinemaScore? - Cinemascore
I do find critic & audience reviews (of any sort) generally better than no data, but not the the final word on any movie.
Yeah, that’s a definite flaw in their system. They reduce each reviewer’s score to a binary positive/negative score. A “good” movie, where every reviewer gave it 3 stars (out of 4) or a B+, and a “fabulous” movie, where every reviewer gave it 4 stars, an A+ rating, and/or called it “the movie of the year” would, AIUI, wind up with identical RT Fresh/Stale ratings.
It’s definitely a useful signal. There are 9 million things to watch on streaming services, I want to increase my hit ratio and checking RT for 2 seconds helps narrow things down. The ratio of audience to critics scores helps as well. My parents aren’t high-brow people so if it’s a high critics rating, but middling or low audience rating I guarantee they won’t like it. The opposite and there’s a good chance they enjoy it.
And worse than that, I believe this means that a movie most critics consider barely “adequate” would get a high 90s-rating, whereas a very different, experimental movie that gets a polarizing mix of very high and very low critic reviews would on average be low 50s or 60s. So it encourages generic, mindless popcorn crowd pleasers…
What Cinemascore doesn’t tell you is that it works like those ratings that businesses use: if you don’t give the employee five stars or ten out of ten, they’re considered a failure. On Cinemascore, any movie that scores less than an “A” is considered damaged. That just drives movie companies to cater to the first night enthusiastic core fan base rather than anything new and different. RT, with all it flaws, is far superior.
It’s a data point for me. I do use the data, but it’s only one data point that I’ll give some consideration to.
My daughter the movie geek pooh-poohs Rotten Tomatoes even though her reviews appear on the site.
I find Metacritic to be far more useful.
What, no mention of the Internet Movie Database?
I don’t watch any film or TV series without first checking the IMDb rating. Life’s too short to be watching garbage, or even so-so stuff.