Is Rotten Tomatoes Intentionally Biased For/Against Certain Films?

[HG Revolution]

Compare their page for American Carol, which has a mixed 44% and has none of their "top critics": http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/an_american_carol/

While Metacritic, a site which collects reviews almost exclusively from the critics who RT proclaims "top critics", has it at a 16% average rating with not a single review giving it over 40%.

RT is also owned by Fox, whose own Bill O'Reilly was a part in this movie. Since the movie wasn't officially screened for critics, they could perhaps pretend critics who hated the movie didn't see it.

[mr.happy]

They just have different ways of representing the reviews and reviewers. Nobody would claim this is an exact science, and I don't think it amounts to an actual bias, as this would surely require them to consistently favor a certain kind of movie. If the kind of bias you propose actually existed, I imagine RT might have scored Religulous considerably lower than they did, but it's actually quite a bit higher, particularly with Top Critics.

RT can really be quite ambiguous with its various rating standards, though. You've got the t-meter critics, the top critics, you've got the fresh/rotten rating, as well as the average rating, and there can often be quite a significant discrepancy between some of those.

[Shawn Hopkins]

I did notice that RT listed an "American Carol" review as "fresh" even though the reviewer said the movie was unfunny and only worth watching as a cultural artifact. It just goes to show how subjective interpretation of reviews can be.

[Spideyzilla]

I have seen RT give bad reviews for some great movies such as Simon Birch and 21. It might be a little biased, but for the most part, I find it fairly honest.

[Joe]

RT can really be quite ambiguous with its various rating standards, though. You've got the t-meter critics, the top critics, you've got the fresh/rotten rating, as well as the average rating, and there can often be quite a significant discrepancy between some of those.

Yes, definitely.

MetaCritic has a tendency to use a narrower margin of critics in its review scale than RT (though I find it odd they include reviews from The Onion) Also, these sites generally take time to gather reviews to new film, so they'll definitely change within the next few days once they update the site's reviews.

[The Weed Of Cri]

The ratings system on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic may be a little arbitrary, but truthfully, what ratings system isn't? The real value in those sites is that you use them to read the viewpoints of several different critics before you decide to buy a ticket. And while critics can be as biased as anyone else, you can find critics whose tastes are similar to your own and use their judgment as a guide.

[J'onn J'onzz]

Well, it's at 13% now, that was just an early rating.

[HG Revolution]

To be fair, now it seems like it's less a bias and more sloppiness.

I remember seeing a review on the Body of Lies page saying it was "A wonderful, creative family movie." I LOLed. Turns out it was a review of City of Ember.

[SirLemming]

Metacritic covers a much smaller spectrum. Sometimes a movie will only have about 10 reviews posted on there, and sometimes a movie won't show up there at all. But RottenTomatoes can have pages upon pages of reviews -- they seem to try to aggregate as many as possible, in an attempt to literally give the average score of absolutely every review there is for the movie.

If any of the two sites have a bias -- though I don't think they do -- it would have to be Metacritic, since they're more selective and therefore they could, in theory, weed out reviews they don't want to show. (But why would "they" care so much?)

The most likely explanation for this example is that with the movie not being screened for critics, RottenTomatoes has a higher ratio of scores for this movie from less professional critics, who tend to be less harsh.