Hollywood can't blame Rotten Tomatoes for recent flops

A recent New York Times article highlighted a growing Hollywood industry trend -- if a film does poorly at the box office, blame Rotten Tomatoes. The website, which aggregates movie reviews and assigns a percentage score with anything 60 or above labeled "Fresh" and anything scoring lower labeled "Rotten," is catching a lot of flack for disrupting ticket sales and tanking films. But Yves Bergquist, the director of the Data & Analytics Project at USC's Entertainment Technology Center decided to throw some data at the issue and see if those claims hold up. From his findings, they do not. We should note that this work hasn't been published in a journal and hasn't been subject to peer review, but this side project of Bergquist's seems to show that there's very little connection -- if any -- between film success and Rotten Tomatoes scores.