Justice League’s Rotten Tomatoes score is 43.

Justice League’s Rotten Tomatoes Score Has Been Unveiled at Last

Justice League’s Rotten Tomatoes Score Has Been Unveiled at Last

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Slate's Culture Blog
Nov. 16 2017 12:51 PM

Justice League’s Rotten Tomatoes Score Has Been Unveiled at Last

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Batman and Wonder Woman, watching Facebook Video, probably.

Clay Enos/Warner Bros.

Rotten Tomatoes is famous for pretty much one thing: aggregating a whole bunch of movie reviews from critics across the internet and turning them into a convenient, single score for a given movie using a “Tomatometer.” The site offers a quick way for users to figure out what the critical consensus is about a given film, aided with a helpful visual of a juicy red tomato or a rotten green splat. It’s what they do! But Rotten Tomatoes delayed the reveal of the score for Justice League, which opens in limited engagement on Thursday, by almost 24 hours and used it as an opportunity to build hype for their new Facebook show See It/Skip It.

Drama, as it so often does, ensued.

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Rotten Tomatoes Will Piss Everyone Off by Delaying Justice League Rating” wrote Gizmodo, while Vanity Fair speculated that the move could appease studios who have blamed low ticket sales on low Rotten Tomatoes scores. The delay would probably not even be newsworthy if Justice League were just any film—and indeed, Rotten Tomatoes has pulled the same move with other titles in the past—but some DC Comics fans have beef with the site because of poor scores in the past for Suicide Squad and Batman v. Superman, which received a 26 and 27, respectively. (Never mind that Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t actually control the opinions of the critics and that there are other, more significant problems with its math-driven approach to subjective criticism.)

In any case, the Justice League score was revealed at last by hosts Jacqueline Coley and Segun Oduolowu on See It/Skip It, with Coley telling viewers, “Obviously we’ve seen the conversations online about the Justice League Tomatometer, and we get it, you guys are passionate about this film, but we hope everyone understands, the only thing we’re trying to do is add context and conversation around the Tomatometer, and not just give a number.”

If you do not like context and conversation to go with your Tomatometer, all you need to know is that the score for Justice League is 43, meaning that 43 percent of critics gave the film a review interpreted as positive. That’s not a great score—a movie needs at least 60 percent to be considered “fresh”—but it’s also not too terrible, and it's consistent with what we found in our review roundup. Hey, they can’t all be critical darlings like Wonder Woman.

Curiously, that 43 has not yet made its way on Justice League's page on the Rotten Tomatoes site itself just yet, so you will just have to throw your own rotten tomato against a hard surface to get the satisfying splat you crave. Sorry.

Update, Nov. 16, 1:36 p.m.: The Rotten Tomatoes score for Justice League is now at 40 percent and has been posted on the site.

Marissa Martinelli is a Slate editorial assistant.