It's become ubiquitous — and quite contentious

This chart helps to explain why.

We're releasing more films now than ever before.

And in a world of excess choice, people need guidance to make tough decisions.

Which is why we need services like Rotten Tomatoes

The internet staple got its start in the late 90s.

And in 2016, Fandango bought its parent company.

Now, you go to buy a ticket, and there it is.

Which makes that rating important to understand.

Because the tomatometer — it's more complex than you might expect.

Films can earn one of three designations: rotten, for movies rated 60% of critics gave a positive review.

Fresh, for those earning a rate above 60%

or Certified Fresh.

That's reserved for films that were reviewed 80 times and 70% or more of the reviews are positive.

5 of those reviews need to be from top critics.

Critics submit a review with their own rating,

or sometimes Rotten Tomatoes asks the critic if it's positive.

If it's borderline, Rotten Tomatoes usually says the review is fresh.

Rotten Tomatoes depends on a small army of reviewers to make the tomatometer work.

There's about three thousand critics that are counted right now though not every critic

reviews every film so it's usually a few hundred per film.

That's Alissa Wilkinson — she's a staff film critic at Vox.com.

Which means her reviews count toward the official Tomatometer.

But the nuance in Alissa's writing is largely reduced to the rating you'll find near the

top of her articles.

Because Rotten Tomatoes uses a thumbs up thumbs down method on everyone's reviews it means

that it kind of makes a vaguer statements of consensus.

we don't get a sense so much of people who have mixed ideas about a film.

Look at these two films: Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant, and Barry Jenkins' Moonlight.

Both films are certified fresh, but the similarities end there.

Alien was an underwhelming blockbuster sequel with a reported budget of 97 million dollars.

Moonlight was an Oscar winning drama from a fledgling director with a budget 1/24th

the size of Alien's.

Both films achieved the blanket consensus needed for the certified fresh badge.

Alien finished with a Tomatometer at 70% — toward the low end of the certified fresh spectrum.

Moonlight received a 98 percent Tomatometer — near total consensus.

But Alien was rated 6.4 out of 10 on average, after Rotten Tomatoes converted critical star

ratings, letter grades, and number scores to its 10 point scale.

Moonlight, on the other hand, earned an average rating of 9 out of 10 per review.

Most critics loved it and agreed with one another.

So the two films earned the badge, but were qualitatively world's apart.

Here's another scenario:

Both Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, and Jordan

Peele's Get Out are highly rated and certified fresh.

But according to the Tomatometer, Get Out edges out Dunkirk by 6 percentage points.

If you saw these scores on the Fandango purchase page, you might think that critics rated Get

Out higher than Dunkirk.

The Rotten Tomatoes page for each film shows that

Dunkirk earned a higher average rating per review.

Dunkirk earned a lower tomatometer because there was less agreement among critics — more

variance in the data.

And when there is less consensus, the rating is lower.

But a cute single tomato rating just can't give you all that information.

Other rating systems try to circumvent these problems with their own methodology.

Metacritic, the most visible aggregator aside from Rotten Tomatoes, is very subjective.

It casts a much smaller net than Rotten Tomatoes, and generally does more interpretation and

weighting in their scoring.

Metacritic is also less transparent about their rating system than Rotten Tomatoes is.

So, is there a one-size fits all, killer method to get digestible and accurate reviews of

film in a fraction of time than it logically could take?

Absolutely not.

That's preposterous;

the whole point of the Tomatometer is to help you make a decision quickly.

If you want context, you click and then you read.

Or, watch.

And in a world of limited time and excess choice, we all benefit from a bit of guidance.

Just make sure you know how your guide is getting you there.