Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang. Although the name "Rotten Tomatoes" connects to the practice of audiences throwing rotten tomatoes in disapproval of a poor stage performance, the direct inspiration for the name from Duong, Lee, and Wang came from an equivalent scene in the 1992 Canadian film Léolo. Since January 2010, Rotten Tomatoes has been owned by Flixster, which was in turn acquired by Warner Bros. in 2011. In February 2016, Rotten Tomatoes and its parent site Flixster were sold to Versant's (then NBCUniversal's) Fandango ticketing company. Warner Bros. retained a minority stake in the merged entities, including Fandango. According to a 2018 survey, almost a third of United States adult moviegoers said they had consulted the site before going to the cinema. It has been criticized for oversimplifying reviews by flattening them into a fresh versus rotten dichotomy. It has also been criticized for being easy for studios to manipulate by limiting early screenings to critics inclined to be favorable, among other tactics.