For years, the IMDB Top 250 was a fact of life, at least for a certain type of movie-award-winning person making some kind of living on the Internet. That list averages user ratings for different movies and comes out with an average score out of 10 still existsBut thanks to the Make the Internet Work Wars Act of 2010, IMDB is one of many websites that doesn’t work like it used to. The same is true of Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregation site that used to primarily aggregate links to a film’s reviews in one place, and now does so, but with a renewed (regretful?) emphasis on what users think (while also giving the impression that they have an overall percentage of “scores” given to films, not just a percentage of critics who have given the film a positive review).
But Rotten Tomatoes’ introduction of the Popcornmeter (popcorn is, famously, a companion food to tomatoes) has resulted in their own version of the IMDb Top 250. Instead of tiebreaking movies with an approval rating of 100% or close to them on Rotten Tomatoes (which will likely be a mix of unimpressive three-star movies, well-intentioned movies without too many reviews, and the occasional genuine masterpiece), this list combines Tomatometer (critics) with Popcornmeter (readers) to come up with some unholy new unreleased but rankable numbers. In other words, they have a list of Best Movies on Rotten TomatoesThrough opaque means that produce somewhat similar, yet different results to the classic IMDB chart. Most noticeable, immediate difference: No shawshock redemption! That IMDB stalwart has been left off the Rotten Tomatoes list entirely, presumably due to the fact that it “only” managed 89% positive reviews (and let’s be honest, that’s probably distorted by retrospect; if Rotten Tomatoes had existed in 1994, I’m sure it would have been closer to 80%). In fact, most of the IMDb top 10s do not make the top 25 on Rotten Tomatoes; Similarly, 20% of the top 25 movies on Rotten Tomatoes do not even make the top 250 on IMDb. Is this the beginning of a new theory?
At least, that’s the attempt of a new Internet list that peeks into the minds of online cinephiles. So, it’s worth checking out. So let’s take a look at the top 25 best movies on so-called Rotten Tomatoes and assess the alternatives within them.
25. how to Train Your Dragon (2010)
Paramount/Everett Collection
