Introduction
Over the course of the past century, films have become a quintessential part of modern life, with dozens of films released every year. Alongside the rise of the film industry, the world has seen the rise of film critics, people tasked with deciding what to watch for the general public. Because of a different set of required knowledge and tastes in films than much of the general public however, there’re often discrepancies and trends found in the films with the highest ratings, in addition to other possible observations about the state of both films and critics that can be drawn.
In order to demonstrate many of the above points and to provide numeric values that we could derive conclusions from, our group created a dataset based on Wikipedia’s “List of Films with 100%’s on Rotten Tomatoes,” Box Office Mojo, and a range of other sources that provided us with data on the actors, directors, and countries of origin of all the films on the list. The data can be found at the following link: dataset link. In addition, all graphs below have interactive elements, such as filtering and viewing only specific portions of the data, available by clicking the rows, columns, and/or keys of any given graph.
Through our research, we were able to draw conclusions on topics such as movie ratings over time, the countries of origin, and the genders of those involved in productions.
Timeline
Note: The graph is capable of being sorted by price, and able to filter out years by clicking the headings
One of the key elements of data collected from the Rotten Tomatoes data set is the Box Office Gross of many of the films within. When shown alongside release year, it’s rapidly apparent that the general trend for the films in the list to remain in the same general gross bracket of under $10M, though there are clearly several exceptions to this, in addition to the large volume of data that lacks gross values. Overall, however, only five films broke $100M, and two of them are from the same franchise.
From this trend, we can gather draw several possible conclusions and hypothesize about the reasons behind them.
First and foremost, the films that tend to get consistently high reviews from the critics are cult/indie films, classics, and documentaries. This is likely a result of the sheer overwhelming number of reviews many of the more popular films listed get, which tends to guarantee a handful of naysayers to bring the score down from the perfect 100%.
Another observation of note is that, despite the general inflation of USD, the general gross has remained largely the same. A trend like this could have many possible explanations, ranging from tying in to the hypothesis from the first observation of the review quantity to the idea that the bar may be lower for films that gross less, as the critics may have had lower expectations going in.
A final observation of note is that the films that broke $50M were from a wide range of decades, which shows that the gross and decades are even more unrelated. It’s very possible that a handful of the older films like Pinocchio made much of their money over the decades that followed through the various other avenues of purchase, but for the most part the films listed didn’t have the status of “Classic” that such a film provides. This, in turn, means that a greater breakdown into trends regarding films across decades is needed, which will be discussed later on in the article.
The largest issue with this portion of the dataset is the lack of full information: many of the films have little-to-no box office data, and, as such, may skew the graph. In order to still allow the films to appear on the timeline, they were given supplementary values of $1.00.
Decade
Our main mission in sorting through all of the data we’ve collected for these films has been to try to find any patterns to how these films have been “graded,” so to speak, over time. One of the first patterns we looked for was just how many films have been given 100% ratings by film critics throughout each decade. Perhaps if we could isolate this data, it would be easier to discover other factors that have had an influence on how films have been rated over the years - and this turned out to be true.
Initially, the data on the number of films that received a 100% critic approval per decade didn’t seem all that significant. A bit surprising, maybe, but not all that significant. The pie chart above shows each decade with the proportion of films that received a 100% rating.
Contrary to what we believed the outcome of our data would be before we’d even collected it, the proportions of earlier films that have received 100% critic approval are not the highest out of all the data. The 1920’s, which were the earliest recorded decade we have in this dataset, only saw perfect scores for 9 out of the 365 films we have in our dataset. Compared with the 130 films from this current decade that have achieved perfect scores, at first glance, it seems as though our predictions have been flip-flopped.
Looking closer, however, there’s likely a very logical reason for this: the longer a film has been in existence, the more time it has had to be exposed to more critics, any of whom has the potential to lower the rating. Based on this, it actually makes a lot of sense for there to be the least number of 100%-rated films from the earliest decade and the most number of 100%-rated films from the most recent decade. Because more recent films have not been exposed to the kind of long-term scrutiny that older films have, they are much more likely to slip through the cracks of criticism - at least for now. As time goes on, we’re sure that some of the films produced in the past decade will begin to fall off this list.
There are, of course, other explanations for these numbers as well. For instance, it may just be that back in the 1920’s, when cinema was just starting to take off as a new form of storytelling and artistic expression, there just weren’t all that many films being produced in the first place. The technology would have been new and difficult to come by, so it’s likely that the volume of films being produced was much lower than what we are used to in an age where you can film an entire movie on an iPhone. With more accessible means of film production at our fingertips today, the potential for a film to earn a perfect score is greater than ever.
One rather peculiar facet of our data is the dip in the number of films to receive a perfect score in the 70s and 80s. Before then, somewhere between 30-40 films had fairly consistently been receiving 100% ratings, but this number dropped down to 20 films per decade for the subsequent years. The reason this isn’t all that clear, but we would speculate that it may have something to do with the rise of what we’d call “feel-good” films today. These are films that typically make a point of appealing more to the general public than to critics. They are made primarily for entertainment purposes, and entertainment purposes alone. The aspects of film that critics paid careful attention to, such as cinematography, sound, and composition, are put on the backburner in favor of things that appease the public, such as engaging characters and funny storylines.
Countries
Over the years from 1920 to 2020, movies made in US have shown strong dominancy in terms of the number of a hundred percent movies, comparing to those from other country origins. US movies have achieved to take over 76% at its highest from 1930 to 1940 and 30% at its lowest from 1980 to 1990. This phenomenon of US movies continuing to be a dominant force in the industry can be explained by the emergence and development of Hollywood film industry which was considered the oldest film industry and had its Golden Age lasted from 1920s to 1960s. As such industry attracted both capital and innovative workforce, Hollywood developed quickly and produced hundreds of high quality movies per year.
Although high quality US films continue their dominant force at Rotten Tomatoes platform, the overall tendency shows that such dominancy is weakening across years. Instead, high quality movies made from countries outside US have gradually taken over the market. As is shown in the graph indicating decade year versus the number of countries, the number of countries has changed from 4 countries in 1920 to 29 countries in 2010. In less than a century, the diversity has multiplied by more than 7 times. Especially during the recent decade from 2000 to 2010, the speed of increasing diversity has achieved its highest to the rate of 123%.
One reason accounts for this phenomenon may be that film industries in other countries developed to their matureness later than those in US. For example, UK’s film industry reached its Golden Age around 1940 and Japan had the Golden Age of cinema in 1950s, right after WWII. Other country like Brazil or China didn’t have its Golden Age in film industries until recent years. As the globalization goes and an increasing accessibility to movies through internet, movies from diverse countries may be favored and this tendency toward diversity may continue.
One fact about Rotten Tomatoes that can not be neglected is that it is a platform originated in US and its users demographics have 30% from US based on the data in 2019. Therefore it is highly likely that US movies have larger advantages than movies from other countries at the first place in Rotten Tomatoes.
Gender
Another angle we thought would be interesting to search for in our dataset was gender. Is there or has there ever been a gender bias when it comes to film criticism? Because of a genuine lack of data, we don’t actually have a clear answer for this. Although we are inclined to say that there is one, the subjectivity of the film-viewing experience, as well as the nearly non-existent diversity of the film industry up until the 1960’s, we’ve found that there is simply too much data missing from our dataset to really comment on the matter. We can, however, say that there is without a doubt a gender bias within the film industry as a whole.
The two bar charts above represent this quite clearly. Among all of the films that have received perfect critic scores, women only began to appear as key members of the film industry - as both credited directors and lead actors - in the 1960’s. The first woman in this dataset to receive a perfect score for a film she directed was Shirley Clarke, with Portrait of Jason in 1967. The first woman from this dataset to be credited with a lead acting role was Julie Andrews, with Mary Poppins in 1964.
Prior to these films, women - insofar as they appear within the films of this dataset - were typically only cast as minor characters. Their roles were to act as foils and/or aids to the motivations of the male protagonists. Perhaps this was merely a mirror of the societal expectations of the time. Before second-wave feminism began to take hold in the 60s, most women were held to such standards in their real lives. Typically relegated to the home, the societal expectations of majority of women who could afford it during that time was subservience to their husbands and minding their children.
Based on our data, it would appear that with the exception of the 1980’s, when no women were credited as directors on any of the twenty films that received perfect scores in that decade, there is a gradual-to-steady increase in the presence of women as key members of the film industry. That being said, women are still massively underrepresented in the film industry according to this particular dataset. Just in this past decade, women have been credited with only half of the amount of lead acting roles that men have been credited, and even fewer credited as directors. There are no non-binary or gender non-conforming people credited in any of these films.
Because there is no way of really knowing the motivations of critics when they rate these films, of knowing whether they have any implicit biases about gender, we aren’t able to answer the question of whether there is any gender bias when it comes to film criticism. We can, however, recognize that the gap of representation between men and women in this dataset is still disconcertingly large, and that there is no representation for people of other genders. While the growth shown in these charts indicates that the conditions of gender representation are improving, there is still plenty of room for improvement.
Conclusion
Film criticism is something that we all love to hate. For most of us, a film is something that we usually watch out of interest for plots or characters. The methods of film critics’ criticisms remain a mystery to us majority of the time. Especially in recent years, it has begun to become more and more apparent that there is a discrepancy between how critics rate films and how the average person rates a film. It seems as though every day there is a new complaint from someone who has watched a critically acclaimed film and hated it, or vice versa.
On a final whim, we decided to collect the public’s opinion of these films with perfect scores, using Rotten Tomatoes popcorn rating system. The results were somewhat surprising. Despite how at odds the opinions of critics and everyday people seem to be, the data we collected shows that over two-thirds of the films received more than a 70% approval rating from average viewers, three of the films receiving a 100% rating from those viewers alongside the critics’. Only one film scored below 50%.
These numbers appear to tell us that, while there is a discrepancy, it’s not as big as the people shouting on the internet make it out to be. That being said, our data also shows that the public’s criticism for films has shown to be harsher to that of critics for films released more recently. Perhaps this is due to the more recent ability for people to leave reviews for films while they are still culturally relevant. Regardless, it is an interesting trend, and we’re curious to see how ratings for these films fair in the coming years.