The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes

The most overrated metric in entertainment is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked-and yet has Hollywood in its grip.

- Lane Brown

IN 2018, A MOVIE-PUBLICITY company called Bunker 15 took on a new project: Ophelia, a feminist retelling of Hamlet starring Daisy Ridley. Critics who had seen early screenings had published 13 reviews, seven of them negative, which translated to a score of 46 percent on the all-important aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes-a disappointing outcome for a film with prestige aspirations and no domestic distributor. ¶ But just because the "Tomatometer" says a title is "rotten"-scoring below 60 percent-it doesn't need to stay that way. Bunker 15 went to work. While most film-PR companies aim to get the attention of critics from top publications, Bunker 15 takes a more bottom-up approach, recruiting obscure, often self-published critics who are nevertheless part of the pool tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. In another break from standard practice, several critics say, Bunker 15 pays them $50 or more for each review. (These payments are not typically disclosed, and Rotten Tomatoes says it prohibits "reviewing based on a financial incentive.")

In October of that year, an employee of the company emailed a prospective reviewer about Ophelia: "It's a Sundance film and the feeling is that it's been treated a bit harshly by some critics (I'm sure skyhigh expectations were the culprit) so the teams involved feel like it would benefit from more input from different critics."