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Rotten Tomatoes Average of Rated Reviews

I saw this comment by Shawngets that Rotten Tomatoes has brought back the average rating and calls it "Average of Rated Reviews" with the note, "Only critic reviews with letter or numerical ratings are included in the average." So this is a bit messy because even scrolling through an example here, it seems like there are still quite a few reviews without such ratings present. I don't recall if RT determined an undisclosed score for every review, or we just assumed that? This seems to mean that we should not actually say (from the example) that, across all 282 reviews, the average rating was 6.60/10. Erik (talk | contrib) 15:02, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

If that is the case, the average rating is useless for encyclopedic purposes if it only represents a portion of the reviews. A number of critics/publications don't provide a rating. As it stands, including an average rating in articles is misleading. Even if RT states the ratio of reviews the average rating is based on, that will have little meaning for readers if not all reviews have a rating (e.g, "... based on 100 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10 based on 76 reviews"). Lapadite (talk) 15:48, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

I don't see how it is useless or meaningless. The actual values don't seem to have changed from before this stat was hidden, so this is likely just as meaningful as it has always been (which, in my opinion, is more meaningful than the actual RT score). They have just reframed how it is presented, and we probably should too as Erik stated. - adamstom97 (talk) 16:13, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

I thought that the average score was more meaningful too, but if they never did any underlying scoring for all reviews, it's been problematic all this time. Which I find ridiculous since I know sentiment analysis is a thing and likely easier now than ever before. I'm skeptical that reframing will happen, because that means added wording. Most RT write-ups lack that, for example obscuring from layperson readers that reviews are only ever categorized as positive or negative. Erik (talk | contrib) 16:25, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

I don't agree that a more restrictive average rating is statistically or encyclopedically meaningless. The RT score itself is not representative of all reviews in existence, only the ones surveyed by Rotten Tomatoes. We assume it is a representative sample, at least of English-language speaking countries, and especially in the case of mainstream films. In the case of the average rating, RT would just be surveying those with an actual score—it is actually a "purer" representation of the ratings that are assigned by a review. There is no reason to assume that the average score would be any different for those that do not assign a score, in the event that they had done so. It just becomes a metric drawn from a subset of reviews, which is often the case for Metacritic too. Betty Logan (talk) 23:35, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

Nardog brought up a past discussion below that I completely forgot about. It seems like, in addition to knowing (and me forgetting) about this issue before, the sentiment at that time was that the template was tweaked to have a distinct enough separation. But if RT is making that upfront clarification now, shouldn't we? Though we won't have a count either way of how many of the reviews were explicitly rated with something. Erik (talk | contrib) 15:33, 10 May 2026 (UTC)

I don't have an issue in drawing this out a little more in the summaries; it seems like a straightforward thing to resolve: "Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes surveyed 265 critics and judged 94% of the reviews to be positive, with an average normalised rating of 8/10 by those critics that had rated it." Or something to that effect. Betty Logan (talk) 22:23, 10 May 2026 (UTC)

I'm not really happy with the vagueness of wording like this. "By those critics who had rated it" leaves room for the possibility that the critics who used ratings tended to think more favorably of the film than critics who didn't use ratings, or that the number of critics who rated it is vastly disproprtionate to the total number of critics being factored into RT's conclusions. I'd be happier if it was clear how many of those 265 critics had rated it. "Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes surveyed 265 critics and judged 94% of the reviews to be positive, with an average normalised rating of 8/10 by the five critics who rated it." DonIago (talk) 02:35, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

I agree with this specificity. Lapadite (talk) 07:26, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

I agree this would be better but it would require us to count how many of the reviews surveyed had a score. Counting per se is not OR so it might be okay policy-wise, but might be a practical challenge. (Also IIRC some reviews appear on the site but don't count toward the Tomatometer. If they don't count toward the average rating either, then we might not be able to get an accurate count at all.) Nardog (talk) 07:58, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

If it's a choice between saying it's based on some number of reviews but we have no idea how many, and not saying anything at all, I'd rather not say anything at all. The number seems potentially useless otherwise, as evidenced in my example. DonIago (talk) 00:02, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

might be a practical challenge

Indeed, and continuously so. It is impractical, unproductive, and problematic to expect editors to account for it in all applicable articles, regardless if it's a one time tally or on a continuous basis, which it inevitably will be since RT's review counts and scores are inherently dynamic and change over time, with its staff "always researching and highlighting reviews and essays from throughout movie history, often from overlooked or forgotten sources". Editors will just update the "average of rated reviews" (readily provided by RT) and not the number of rated reviews (not readily provided by RT), so whatever tally was previously added to Wikipedia will stay (not updated). We shouldn't even bother with that for the reason you mentioned. Οἶδα (talk) 11:16, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Not that fussed over the wording; we can use alternative phrasing such as "graded it" or "assigned a rating" etc, but I don't see how we are able quantify the number of raters unless I'm missing something.... Anyon know if there is a way to grab it from the source code? Betty Logan (talk) 11:29, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

What do you mean? The ratings appear alongside pull quotes on the list of reviews so we could just count them, assuming they're all factored into the average. Nardog (talk) 15:21, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

Some films have several hundred reviews. And are they all factored into the rating? Betty Logan (talk) 04:03, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Why wouldn't they be? Nardog (talk) 04:29, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

What if certain reviews (such as those by Top Critics) are weighted differently? Ultimately, Rotten Tomatoes gives us an average rating based on a subset of graded reviews and that's all we really know. I don't believe we should go beyond that in our exposition. Betty Logan (talk) 05:02, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

AFAIK there's no such "weighting" and it's pretty easy to confirm how the number is derived. You can just take the scores in the list and average them (though letter grades can be tricky). I don't ultimately disagree that counting them and giving the number in the article might be a little too OR-ish though. Nardog (talk) 05:14, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

For transparency and accuracy, RT has a responsibility to state the number, or at least percentage, of critics that provided a rating. For that same purpose, so do we. Thats's why I think the average rating shouldn't be used unless the ratio of reviews it's based on is given by RT. If it is used, we should specify that RT's average rating is based on an unknown portion of the selected reviews. For all the notable films released in a year, it's extra work to have to look through often dozens of reviews and keep up with incoming ones, especially for high profile films. Lapadite (talk) 17:25, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

We usually have a headline figure; for example, RT surveyed 265 reviews for Casino Royale, and 34 of the first 50 provided a rating, so in this case the reviews provide a rating by an approximate ratio of 2:1. I can see why a very low number of reviews providing a rating might be a problem (and we probably shouldn't include one in those cases), but I don't see why it matters if the rating draws from 150 reviews or 200 reviews. Once you are sure you have enough reviews for the sample to be statistically sound then the significance of the sample size becomes less important. Statistics is usually more concerned with orders of magnitude i.e. 10, 100, 1000 etc. Betty Logan (talk) 04:40, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

That would be a sound argument for including the figure in a given article vs not. Nevertheless, still impractical to update. And resolved easily if RT would just do the job for us. I'm not sure why they felt the need to more effectively communicate what the average rating represents (rated reviews) but not display a simple count of said rated reviews. Οἶδα (talk) 11:34, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

I don't recall if RT determined an undisclosed score for every review, or we just assumed that? RT never did that; it seems you just assumed that. And you discovered it last year. What they've brought back is exactly what they had, they're just now clearer about what it is. Nardog (talk) 01:34, 10 May 2026 (UTC)

Well, I completely forgot about that! Thanks for reminding me. What do you think should be done here? Erik (talk | contrib) 15:18, 10 May 2026 (UTC)

• Comment – Here's the current wording used in {{RT prose}}:

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, percentage of count critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of X/10.

The simplest solution that seems to satisfy the concerns above would be to add "subset of reviews" in some fashion. We shouldn't need to put a number on that. Perhaps we can change it to something like:

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, percentage of count critics' reviews are positive, and the average rating among a subset of reviews is X/10.

There's a lot more we can do to cleanup the beginning of that sentence, but trying that now would likely run into more opposition. A baby step approach is more likely to gain immediate approval. --GoneIn60 (talk) 13:30, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

It needs to be clarified that the rating is only based on a portion of the reviews so I support any neutral wording that conveys this. I like your suggestion. I agree we shouldn't be going around manually counting hundreds of reviews trying to do RT's job. Lapadite (talk) 03:51, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

Οἶδα suggested "and the average of rated reviews is X/10" at the template talk page here. That's pretty good too. Fine with either. --GoneIn60 (talk) 05:25, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

I still think without saying how many reviews are included in that average rating that we're not serving our readership. If 50 reviewers reviewed a film but only five of them included a rating that RT is taking into account, the average rating becomes meaningless or even misleading. DonIago (talk) 05:59, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

Valid point, but likely an edge case. Perhaps the right approach is that in edge cases like that, we either omit the average rating altogether or use custom phrasing to include the number of reviews, since the number is small. The decision can be left up to discussion on talk. Such guidance can be added to MOS:FILM and {{RT prose}}. -- GoneIn60 (talk) 06:03, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

I made the point earlier that, as it is, the average rating is misleading and meaningless as it doesn't represent all selected reviews, and for that reason it shouldn't be used at all. But if we're still using it, I'd prefer not encouraging editors to waste time counting hundreds of reviews, which potentially leads to mistakes too, not to mention other editors unaware of this might challenge it down the line. I think if an aggregator is not transparent or accurate in their content we should make that clear to readers when presenting it. Lapadite (talk) 06:50, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

If an aggregator isn't being transparent/accurate, then my preference would be that we don't include the opaque/inaccurate information, but yes, absolutely if we are going to include it then we should make it clear that we have concerns about the data we're reporting. DonIago (talk) 15:25, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

Back when they removed average ratings I petitioned to have the figure removed from the RT prose template and that went absolutely nowhere, despite the rating not even existing anymore. I would be surprised if you could actually succeed in having it removed from that template or suppressed in articles altogether. In the meantime, as hinted above, user can count the number or rated reviews and suggest on relevant talk pages that the number is too low to be meaningful. Certainly not a perfect solution though. Οἶδα (talk) 21:59, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

Given that when that template came up for discussion here the prevailing view seemed to be that it should be substituted if not deleted entirely, I'd happily support deleting it altogether, and I've been considering boldly changing it to auto-substitute. However, I was the one who'd initiated the discussion regarding how it should generally be handled, and there didn't seem to be a lot of collective will here to do anything about it at the time. DonIago (talk) 01:40, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

Veering a bit sideways, but... As mentioned in that RfC (in several comments and the closing summary), it would have to be formally decided by consensus in a TfD. Two prior attempts to delete or relegate to subst only failed in past TfDs. -- GoneIn60 (talk) 10:50, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

It doesn't appear from my review of TfD that switching a template to auto-substitution requires a TfD? DonIago (talk) 16:12, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

I wouldn't fault you for not seeing it, because it's not clearly spelled out for templates. You have to weave together different threads for it to make sense.

• At WP:TFD#REASONS, there's advice to "Initiate a discussion on the template talk page if the correct use itself is under debate."

Demoting to subst only is a form of correcting use. This has been discussed there more than once, but consensus was never reached.

• You might think an RfC is the next step, but at WP:RFCNOT, we see that RFCs are not to be used for deletion processes.

It will be clear in the next bullet why "subst only" is a deletion review process.

• At WP:TFD#Discussion, we see that some acceptable !votes include "subst, subst and delete, or similar."

This demonstrates that TfD is the appropriate venue to formally demote a template to subst only when consensus cannot be achieved on the template talk page.

Now you could move forward with your thought of being BOLD. But given that you are aware of past TfDs where there was consensus against deletion and possibly a weak consensus against subst only (or at least no consensus), I wouldn't recommend it. Further discussion bringing something new to the table has the best chance of success, but more importantly, it will take significant participation from this project. -- GoneIn60 (talk) 18:23, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

This has stalled. Can we get consensus on the language to update the RT template? Many film articles use this template and an editor has reverted noting RT's update for readers. Lapadite (talk) 20:50, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

TIFF

Just a quick reminder that with the Toronto International Film Festival introducing a full film market this year, we're going to have to start paying greater attention to the phenomenon of people conflating the market with the real public festival, and claiming that a film premiered at TIFF when it really just had a private market screening at the convention centre and was not part of the actual public program at Scotiabank or the Lightbox. We already run into this with Cannes on a regular basis (and I think Venice and Locarno to a lesser extent, though not as badly as Cannes in my experience) — since we're still some weeks out from the full program, this isn't an immediate problem yet, but it is one we're going to have to watch out for more actively going forward. Bearcat (talk) 18:29, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

Also, last year they messed up the dates and times on their website. The TIFF website was adjusting the screening times based on users' local browser time zones, instead of displaying them consistently in Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), the time zone of Toronto, where the festival is held. This resulted in incorrect dates being entered as the official premiere date, particularly by people who weren't aware that the time adjustment was browser-based. I contacted festival representatives about the issue and they corrected their website. Let's hope they've fixed that for good. Οἶδα (talk) 17:17, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

June 2026 GAN Backlog Drive

Good article nominations | June 2026 Backlog Drive
June 2026 Backlog Drive: Do you want to become more experienced in the GA process? On 1 June, a one-month backlog drive for good article nominations will begin. Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles reviewed. Mentors are available, and new reviewers (<6 reviews) get bonus points! Interested in taking part? You can sign up here.
Other ways to participate: Join the conversations on our talk page.
You're receiving this message because you have participated in a good article review this year or participated in the previous backlog drive.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:59, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

Category:Black-and-white films by year has been nominated for discussion

Category:Black-and-white films by year has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Οἶδα (talk) 17:10, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Terminator 2: Judgment Day

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Terminator 2: Judgment Day § Summary accuracy about T-1000's demise, which is within the scope of this WikiProject. George Ho (talk) 19:03, 3 June 2026 (UTC)

Advice on Notable Alumni sections for film festival articles

I'm the Executive Director of Encounters Film Festival (declared COI) and have proposed an expansion of the Notable Alumni section on the article's Talk page. An editor has suggested the section should be cut entirely as promotional which was not my intention but of course I can understand why it would come across like that. I'd welcome guidance from more experienced editors on whether Notable Alumni sections are appropriate for film festival articles, and if so, what the encyclopedic standard looks like. The discussion is here. DaveTaylorMatthews (talk) DaveTaylorMatthews (talk) 11:07, 4 June 2026 (UTC)

Etymology of "offline editing"

Hi!

I'm wondering if anyone from this WikiProject can provide some additional information on the etymology of "offline editing". I did some cleanup on post-production articles this January but it has been brought to my attention that maybe this term is used differently in various circles. Please do share any insights on Talk:Offline_editing. Thank you all! I love Wikipedia, and it is my favorite resource for the world's information! David Cako (talk) 02:04, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

Draft:Spacetime Chronicles review request

Hello,

I recently revised Draft:Spacetime Chronicles after it received a G15-related decline due to broken references and accidental markdown formatting in an earlier version.

The draft has since been rewritten in a shorter and more neutral encyclopedic style using sources including Annecy Festival, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Screen Daily, Cineuropa and Cartoon Brew.

Would someone from WikiProject Film be willing to review the draft and suggest improvements if needed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Spacetime_Chronicles

Thank you. Stefanobertelli1981 (talk) 10:22, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

Plot length discussed at Talk:Gold Diggers of Broadway

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Gold Diggers of Broadway § Plot getting too lengthy, and further edits made, which is within the scope of this WikiProject. George Ho (talk) 21:27, 11 June 2026 (UTC)