Just to add my two cents- it drives me up a wall to read time and again people trying to end movie arguments with the Rotten Tomataoes qualifier. The -"Look at Rotten Tomatoes and see that I am right."- argument is as hollow as the "look- it made $50 Million on opening weekend" argument. Rotten Tomatoes is an aggragate scoring guide that uses dubious sources along with well-reknown sources (if we really have any
real learned critics anymore).
Rotten Tomatoes is the movie's equilvilent of "it is true because so many believe it". Or
argumentum ad populum.
From Wikipedia:
An
argumentum ad populum (
Latin for "
appeal to the people") is a
fallacious argument that concludes that a
proposition is true because many or most people believe it: "If many believe so, it is so."
This type of argument is known by several names,
[1] including
appeal to the masses,
appeal to belief,
appeal to the majority,
appeal to democracy,
appeal to popularity,
argument by consensus,
consensus fallacy,
authority of the many, and
bandwagon fallacy (also known as a
vox populi),
[2] and in
Latin as
argumentum ad numerum ("appeal to the number"), and
consensus gentium ("agreement of the clans"). It is also the basis of a number of social phenomena, including
communal reinforcement and the
bandwagon effect. The Chinese
proverb "
three men make a tiger" concerns the same idea.
The latter "big box office" argument fails beacuse it assumes, that by simply buying a ticket to see the film- that that is an ersatz "yea" vote for the film. When I buy a ticket I am not giving
approval of the film- I am simply
going to the film. If 100 people buy a ticket, Hollywood judges that as 100 "yea" votes- even if those 100 people agreed that it was a terrible film.
Rotten Tomatoes and Box Office numbers are not proof of a film's quality or worth.
The first is Vox populi, and the second just tells me how many people went to see it.
