Wonder Woman Is Not The Best Superhero Movie Of All Time

Don’t get me wrong, I love Wonder Woman. It’s a great film, it’s easily the best film in the DCEU at this point, so please don’t take this MoviePush blogpost to be “hating” on Wonder Woman. I’m definitely not.

But I do take issue with Rotten Tomatoes ranking it as “The Best Superhero Movie Of All Time” in their recent listing of the best 50 superhero movies, and here’s why…

Basically it’s a manipulated and (therefore) biased list.

Why?

Rotten Tomatoes hasn’t used their standard rating system to create this rank ordering. They’ve used an adjusted score from a weighted formula (Bayesian) that accounts for variations in the number of reviews per movie. There’s no real explanation as to why? Is it a better, more representative method for aggregating film reviews? If so, then why isn’t it the Rotten Tomato standard scoring system?

There are very little details on what criteria was used to adjust or weight the “new” scores, but I’m sure you could adjust the weighting in a variety of ways and get whatever movie you wanted to land in position 1.

As a result, this adjusted score completely undermines the existing Rotten Tomatoes scoring system and in turn undermines Wonder Woman being ranked the number one superhero movie of all time.

I hate to say it, but this just feels like a weak publicity stunt to build hype around Wonder Woman. The amount of articles or tweets I’ve seen today with the headline “Wonder Woman is the greatest superhero movie of all time” is crazy. So yeah, it worked, but it’s fundamentally not true or accurate.

If Rotten Tomatoes used the actual Rotten Tomatoes scores (and why wouldn’t they unless that didn’t give them the result they wanted…), there are a number of superhero movies that rank higher than Wonder Woman (with 92%), namely: -

• The Incredibles – 97%
• The Dark Knight – 94%
• Iron Man – 93%
• Logan – 93%
• Thor Ragnarok – 93%
• Superman (1978) – 93%

The Avengers and Spider-Man: Homecoming are also equal to Wonder Woman with 92%.

Not including my personal opinion, and just using the Rotten Tomatoes “traditional” scoring systems there are 6 – 8 movies that are considered better or equal to Wonder Woman. But I guess highlighting The Incredibles as the best superhero movie of all time, just wouldn’t get the same amount of headlines in 2017.

So yeah, Wonder Woman is a truly great film, but even by Rotten Tomatoes own scoring systems it is not the best superhero movie of all time.

Written by @RossBishop for MoviePush. Follow Ross on Twitter.