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…
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%
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.
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