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Using Rotten Tomatoes to Track Careers: A Cool Tool

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I use Rotten Tomatoes a lot. The movie review website has become a useful short hand for how well a film is being reviewed because it takes a lot of reviews and aggregates them into one easy number on a scale of 1 to 100. So if you look at the ratings on there right now, you can see that lots of critics like X-Men: First Class (87) but not many enjoyed The Hangover Part II (35). It also has nice graphics -- a squashed green tomato for bad movies and a lovely red tomato for good movies. *

There's also a ton of data in there. If you look up an actor by name, you can see his Rotten Tomato scores throughout the years. So for instance here's all the historical ratings for films that star James McAvoy, my current obsession.

Writers at the website Slate got Rotten Tomatoes to share all of that data with them so they could analyze it. (Note: Wish I'd thought of doing that.) They analyzed the data and found that the average rating has gone down year over year and that actors, on average, receive slightly worse reviews and then their numbers go up and plateau. This chart is from the Slate article:

But the best part of what they did with the data is an interactive tool that lets you plug in any actor or director and chart his or her rise and fall in reviews.

So first I took a look at the career of Angelina Jolie, the highest ranked actor on our annual Celebrity 100 list. Here's what her chart looks like:

Then I overlaid her career trajectory with Johnny Depp's. The two starred together in the recent film The Tourist and he is the second highest ranking actor on our list. Here's what that chart looks like:

Pretty cool. While Depp has his ups and downs he never has a big career valley like Jolie does between 2000 and 2005. And as of around 2007, their charts start to almost sync up.

Anyway, it's a fun tool and I highly recommend it. You can click here to play. Slate calls the tool the Career-O-Matic.

*For what it's worth, I actually prefer the website Metacritic to Rotten Tomatoes. Both sites aggregate reviews from around the country, but Rotten Tomatoes considers each review on a black and white, thumbs up or down basis and then gives the percentage of positive reviews. Metacritic is a bit more subtle. It gives each review a rating on a scale of 1 to 100 and then averages out the ratings to come up with a final number. I refer to Rotten Tomatoes more in my stories because it's more well known but if you like movie reviews, check out Metacritic too.