Rotten Tomatoes Will No Longer Allow Users To Review Movies Before They’re Officially Released

Rotten Tomatoes has made a number of changes to its rating system, including removing the ability for fans to rate movies and TV shows before they have been officially released.

We currently live in an age where a lot of what we say and do is based on the opinions of other people. If we hear something good about a TV show on Netflix, we’ll probably give it a spin ourselves. New restaurant nearby getting rave reviews? Let’s pop by this weekend and see what all the fuss is about.

The thing is, sometimes people tend to base their decisions on the opinions of others a little too much. That is particularly true when it comes to movies. If a new release gets a few duff reviews, it feels as if the whole world is against it. We have often asked friends to go and see a movie with us and we have been greeted with something along the lines of “have you seen what people have been saying about it online?”

That is all well and good to an extent, although extremely annoying if you want to see a movie and no one else does, but what about movies being criticized before they are even released? Popular TV show and movie review site Rotten Tomatoes has taken steps to try and remedy that. As of this week, audience members will not be able to rate or review movies on the site before they are officially released, reports Polygon.

That makes sense to us. How can you possibly have formed an opinion on a film before you have even seen it? The move by Rotten Tomatoes is an attempt to stop people from “review bombing” movies. That is where waves of audience members purposefully rate a movie poorly based on factors that usually don’t determine whether the movie is actually good or bad. It has happened to Black Panther, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and even the upcoming Star Wars movie that won’t be released until December 2019 and doesn’t even have a title yet.

In a statement released by Rotten Tomatoes, the site revealed that only authorized critics will be able to leave ratings and reviews for movies before they are released from now on. It has also made a couple of other notable changes, including the “want to see” figure being changed from a percentage to a total. The reasoning for this is to prevent site users from confusing it with the “audience score.

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