A fan project built around Jackie Chan
Rotten Tomatoes began with a focused problem: reviews of martial-arts films its founder loved were scattered across newspapers and magazines. Gathering them in one place made it easier to see how critics were responding without tracking down every review individually. The site’s starting point was Jackie Chan—not a plan to rank the whole movie industry.
From collecting reviews to compressing opinion
The useful trick was not simply storing reviews but reducing them to a signal readers could scan. Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer counts the share of included critics’ reviews classified as positive; it is not an average score for how strongly those critics liked a film. That distinction makes the number quick to compare, but it also strips away differences in tone and reasoning. A mildly favorable review and an enthusiastic one can both count as positive.
As the site expanded beyond its original niche, the same compact measure could be applied to many kinds of releases. That made Rotten Tomatoes useful as a browsing shortcut—and made its score easy to mistake for a verdict on a movie’s quality. Its origin points to a different purpose: helping fans find and gather opinions about the films they cared about, beginning with Jackie Chan’s martial-arts movies.
