Oh wait, today is one of the days where we're taking Rotten Tomatoes reviews on blind faith??

Shit, my schedule must've gotten mixed up, according to mine today we're supposed to be Damning them for not being blind fools incapable to see the obvious greatness of that thing we all love. And then NEXT week using Rotten Tomatoes as the ultimate bible for what a movies worth without ever seeing it.

Sorry, sorry, my bad.

I don't think there's a hard equation to determining RT's accuracy. Dallas Buyers Club is a monstrous piece of hell garbage which somehow was very well received.

But 18% for a high-concept sci-fi movie by a first-time director? I think we can safely assume that this is a pretty accurate score.

I've found quite a few mistakes on Rotten Tomatoes: reviews that were said to be "fresh" that were actually pretty unambiguously negative, and vice-versa; so I usually end up reading a few of the reviews to see if they actually line up with what RT said of them, which, of course, completely defeats the point of having the aggregate score. In fact, reading some of the Transcendence reviews shows that a lot more of the reviewers were on the fence about the movie than that 18% score implies.

What happens most of the time is that movies with mixed-but-mostly-positive reviews get really high RT scores. Usually there's not too much dissonance, but occasionally you get a movie like Captain America 2 with an 89%, even though the average score is only 7.5.

The Rotten Tomatoes community is the worst thing about it. It rivals IMDb for Worst Online Movie Community.

I'd rather a good sequel/reboot than a shitty "original" film.

And if they're genuinely good, who cares? Most of them will probably suck, but that's not because they're based on an existing property. They'll suck for plenty of other reasons.