Don't Sweat the Tomatometer (May 3, 2019)

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
Rotten Tomatoes has put together a ranking of 47 movies based on video games. It's an interesting read to see all of the different films represented here, even if the Wing Commander ranking is atrocious. WC comes in at 35th place thanks to its 10% score. I get that it's not the type of film that a professional reviewer is going to rush to thumbs up, and there's plenty of reasons why casual fans may or may not like it, but it's just not that bad. Among the ranks of cringey awful video game movies, it should really be in the upper quarter. You can check out the ranking for yourself here.






Thanks to Robin Ward and Gordon Lucas for the tip!

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Original update published on May 3, 2019
 
Tomato meter isn't even a ranking of how good or bad a movie is. It's very specifically only rates how many reviewers on average like it or don't. Every single reviewer could rate the movie 49 percent (I don't know what the cuttoff to be a "fresh" review is) and the tomato meter reading could be 0% because every reviewer technically said the movie wasn't good. Another movie could be arguably just as terrible but every review works out to 51 percent and the Tomato meter would be 100%
 
That ranking is still odd. I mean even within a series. Resident Evil the final Chapter is the best real live RE movie? Really?
 
That ranking is still odd. I mean even within a series. Resident Evil the final Chapter is the best real live RE movie? Really?

Vendetta rated higher than Final chapter, but even Final chapter was barely 2% higher than the First film in the franchise. However, this still doesn't mean anything. All it says is that there were slightly on average more positive reviews on the newer films. With Tomato meter, the farther back you go, the more wonky the rating is as well because they weren't keeping track of the reviews when those films first came out. To some degree they rey on people going back after the fact to enter reviews. Also, for reviews of later films in the Resident Evil franchise, by the time those movies came out the only people going to see them were fans of the franchise anyway, which will of course skew the favorable ratio in it's favor.
 
Some video game movies, like the RE series accomplish what they set out to do, and they are reviewed on those terms.
The WC movie felt like it was aiming for a higher standard which it failed to meet and it was accordingly judged.
 
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