Summary

• Rotten Tomatoes owes its existence to Jackie Chan's action-comedy "Rush Hour," as the website started as a fansite for the film in 1998.
• Rotten Tomatoes became more popular in 1999 after featuring reviews for films like "Star Wars: Episode 1" and "The Blair Witch Project," leading to its official launch in April 2000.
• Rotten Tomatoes has had a profound impact on the industry, despite controversy surrounding its scoring system and criticisms from filmmakers like Martin Scorsese.

Rotten Tomatoes owes its existence to a Jackie Chan action classic. The action movies Jackie Chan made in Hong Kong such as the Drunken Master or Police Story films may have been hugely popular with fans of the genre, but they did little to help the star break into American films. This wasn't for lack of trying; during the '80s, Chan starred in several American productions, like The Big Brawl or The Protector. Both were financial disappointments and neither captured what made Chan such a unique presence onscreen.

Of course, Chan would crack Hollywood during the late '90s/early '00s thanks to a string of hits like Rumble in the Bronx. Chan rarely appears in English-language productions - outside of occasional films like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem - these days, but his status as an action icon has been long secured. The Rush Hour movies are Chan's biggest American franchise by far, and a potential fourth film reuniting him with Chris Tucker keeps being threatened every few years.

Rotten Tomatoes Started Life As A Fansite For Jackie Chan's Rush Hour

Chan's 1998 action-comedy is key to Rotten Tomatoes' origin

The original film came along during a wave of Hollywood movies that drew influence from Asian cinema, such as Lethal Weapon 4 - which made Jet Li the villain - or the John Woo-inspired Replacement Killers. Rush Hour was a shock hit, grossing over $240 million worldwide on a relatively modest budget. An unexpected legacy of Rush Hour is that Rotten Tomatoes started life as a fansite to cover it, with co-founder Senh Doung being a huge fan of Chan. Doung (via the website Rotten Tomatoes as a hobby project that collected reviews of Chan's Hong Kong output in 1998.

The first non-Jackie Chan movie covered on Rotten Tomatoes was the dark Ben Stiller comedy Your Friends & Neighbors.

Doung launched the site ahead of the film's release in the summer of 1998, though Rush Hour would ultimately get pushed to September. Regardless, Yahoo spotlighted this little website shortly after its launch, which saw traffic steadily increase. The name Rotten Tomatoes was inspired by a scene from the arthouse comedy Léolo, where a boy has a daydream about his mother falling into a cart filled with tomatoes, where she, in turn, became pregnant with him (via Rotten Tomatoes).

How Rotten Tomatoes Evolved Beyond Rush Hour

Rotten Tomatoes arrived at the perfect time for online film fandom

Traffic for the website increased rapidly in 1999. Duong's co-founders at design firm Design Reactor, Patrick Lee and Stephen Wang, soon noticed how popular RT was becoming, thanks to views for films like Star Wars: Episode 1 and The Blair Witch Project. They soon became part of the site full-time and helped it evolve, and it officially launched in April 2000. Over the years, RT's aggregate review scores from major critics became part of the cultural conversation, and its popularity would continue to grow.

The site would change hands several times over the years too, from IGN in 2004 to Flixster and finally Fandango, which itself was later acquired by Warner Bros. The rise of social media would increase the site's influence, with moviegoers tending to look up the scores for a new release before going to see it. Nowadays, Fandango displays the RT scores on its website, and a Google search for any film or television series will include its aggregate reviews too.

Rotten Tomatoes Has Had A Profound Impact On Film Fandom

RT would transform the industry itself

The simple concept behind Rotten Tomatoes has resulted in no end of controversy from critics and filmmakers alike, since dividing movies into "Fresh" or "Rotten" depending on their RT score isn't the most accurate measure of a film's merits. In fact, it often oversimplifies discussions around them. Most visitors to the site tend not to look at any of the reviews pooled for the score, so the voices of individual critics are drowned out. While there are still many respected critics in the profession, it feels like the website itself has become the only "critic" audiences now listen to.

Some believe Rotten Tomatoes' scoring system is fundamentally broken and many filmmakers have railed against it, with Martin Scorsese even dubbing the site a "disgusting spectacle" that devalues the artform (via University of Illinois College of Media). Major studios and distributors are often concerned about how a movie's RT score will impact box office - though studies suggest a movie's grosses aren't massively affected by this - while they're often accused of trying to "game" the system. This includes tactics like withholding advanced screenings or accusations of paying reviewers for positive notices, which happened with the 2018 Daisy Ridley movie Ophelia.

There's often a huge disparity between the review scores that professional critics give and the audience score. In short, Rotten Tomatoes' impact on the business is a profound and complex one, and it's only continuing to evolve. The journey of the website from Rush Hour fanpage to transforming an entire industry is, nonetheless, a fascinating one.

Source: SFGate, Rotten Tomatoes, University of Illinois College of Media