Languages ​​other than English hinder Rotten Tomatoes . rating

Fredrik Sonck (HBL Krönika 19.6) recommends Rotten Tomatoes (RT), a TV drama and movie review site, to anyone who wants to avoid wasting their time on the “turkey movies” that streaming services often recommend.

As an RT user, I have nothing against this. But I think Sonck could have paid more attention to RT’s language limitation – even its narrowness.

Now the case is that nearly 90 percent, if not more, of the films and TV series shown and discussed in Finland (theatres, TV channels, streaming services) appear to be in English and originate from the USA, Great Britain, or the former colonies of the latter .

So, Rotten Tomatoes, which bases its centenary ratings on English critics’ texts about – usually – English-language products, aligns well with Finnish presentation and interest.

But sometimes a movie or TV drama appears that you want to check its title on RT and… you can’t find it. Or very few reviewers.

What are you doing? For Sonk, the issue is quite straightforward. No or few reviews mean the RT rating is below “60-70 percent”, which is “rare” enough for it.

Sure, it could be a turkey. But it could also be the classic Bollywood romcom “Hum Tum” (2004). RT found two “professional” reviews for them, so no rating was given (the audience rating is 86 percent).

A more recent example: the South Korean movie “My Mister” (2018) which can currently be seen on Netflix – but I can’t find it on RT at all. Thus, Sonic’s “60-70 percent” criterion was not met. My own rating is 100 percent. In other words, five out of five stars.

And the Turkish “50m2” (with Aybüke Pusat, 2021) does not have an RT rating: very few reviews (my rating: three out of five.

Hence the impression is that if it is not English, this is a more or less effective obstacle to RT rating. So I want to make an exception to the Sonck criterion: even if there is no rating, the production is still worth watching – provided the language Not It is English.

Sakari Altonin Helsinki

Answer I, of course, agree with Rotten Tomatoes’ limitations, and I also touch on the service’s focus on English-language products in the article. The number of reviews in itself does not affect the percentage of positive reviews from them, so a movie or series with a small number of reviews can get a high rating quite well. However, this classification should be taken with a pinch of salt more than others. And when a work receives no or very few reviews, Rotten Tomatoes does not naturally provide a reliable indication of the collective opinion of critics.

Frederic Sonek, Head of Culture, HBL