Updating the Tomatometer

I stumbled across this statistic today, from a recent study from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, looking at the demographics of film critics and the impact that this has on the film industry: for every film critic who is female and a racial minority in the Rotten Tomatoes critical pool, there are 17.7 white male critics. The minority female critics wrote just 4% of the reviews on 300 films released in 2017, while white male critics wrote 65%. And this is a problem because our inherent biases related to race and gender tend to affect how we view media, and movies about women of color tend to get more negative reception from white male critics, and more positive reception from female minority critics. So, if you want to improve the prospects of minority women in Hollywood, you've got to boost minority women in the critical community too.

So, you may have noticed that I'm an Asian-American woman who blogs about film for my own amusement, and have devoted posts in the past to Hollywood's representation issues. Is it strange that I didn't notice the lack of diversity among movie critics was a problem until now? Paging through the two reports, I think they do a good job of pointing out issues with how Rotten Tomatoes operates, but I'm not so sure that they say as much about the actual state of film criticism. For one thing, Rotten Tomatoes traditionally only aggregated the opinions of critics who write their reviews for certain publications. The critical community is bigger than that, including bloggers, vloggers, and other social media figures, who tend to be younger and more diverse. These critics can be more influential than the traditional ones, since there are plenty of moviegoers who won't read a written movie review, but might watch a streaming video of one. Youtubers like Chris Stuckmann reach more young moviegoers than your average newspaper critic these days.

Taking this into account, are minority and female critics still underrepresented to such an overwhelming degree? I honestly have no idea, because I don't know who else is out there that I'm not aware of. In other words, I don't know what I don't know. I also have some considerable self-selection biases here, because I don't engage with the critical community nearly as much as I used to. When I do, however, I'm more likely to be reading something written by a freelancer contributing to a variety of different online publications than a big name like Peter Travers or A.O. Scott. I know that I've never had much trouble finding the critical voices from my own demographic. Shoutout here to Angie Han, Jen Yamato, and Inkoo Kang. On the other hand, not everyone goes looking for the critics that are more reflective of their views, the way I do. And I know I'm not exposed to black and Latino voices in the critical community as much as I should be. Like so many others, I'm guilty of not paying enough attention.

I do use the Tomatometer occasionally, when I'm trying to gage whether certain films are worth my time, and I'm all for making sure that it reflects a more diverse array of opinions. So I'm very happy that Rotten Tomatoes recently announced - in direct response to the Annenberg reports - that they were going to expand their criteria for critics in order to help diversification efforts. Now new media, like podcasts and video reviews, will be considered when determining the eligibility of critics. This means independent online critics like Korey Coleman and Martin Thomas of Double Toasted are finally on the Tomatometer. The site is also setting up a grant program to help get critics from underrepresented groups access film festivals, an important source of early buzz for smaller films.

Diversification is in Rotten Tomatoes' best interests too, remember. They only stay relevant as long as their users think they're accurately reflecting the critical consensus. As underrepresented and minority talent has made some impressive gains in visibility in Hollywood this year, it's only right that the most high profile platform of the critical community should follow suit. There's still a lot of room for improvement here, and this is a good reminder to stay mindful of the unconscious biases we're all subject to.


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