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Melania drops 67% at US box office as Rotten Tomatoes defends record-breaking audience scores
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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RT critic score always was shite, they would push expensive shit projects in the 90+% range constantly.
The audience score usually has been more reliable but as this instance shows, it's super easy to manipulate as well.
IMDB scores are much more reliable
My dude, critics just value different things than everyday audiences. When you watch movies for a living you become jaded and value uniqueness more than anything. General audiences care a whole lot less about uniqueness and just want something entertaining. That's why you get off the wall stuff with high critic ratings but low audience ratings, or fairly generic but entertaining stuff with low critic ratings but high audience ratings.
Just know how to read the scores and RT is still the most useful around. Critic score are uniqueness, cinematography, and potentially storytelling. Critics also like drama much more than the average person. Audience scores are for entertainment value. But you also need to take the scores in context of genres you like. If you love scifi and a movie has a 50% audience score, you'll probably enjoy it plenty. If you hate scifi it's probably not for you at all.
This is the most useful comment I read in a long time.
How is IMDb much more reliable? I'd argue that's even easier to manipulate as you don't need to buy a ticket to leave a review. Review bombing (in either direction) is pretty rampant on IMDB.
Pretty much anything that reaches a critical mass now gets manipulated. Web 2.0 saw to that.