Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes is a website launched in 1998 devoted to film reviews and news; it is widely known as a film review aggregator. Coverage now includes TV content as well. The name derives from the practice of audiences throwing rotten tomatoes when disapproving of a poor stage performance. The company was created by Senh Duong and since January 2010 has been owned by Flixster, which itself was acquired in 2011 by Warner Bros.

Since 2007, the website's editor-in-chief has been Matt Atchity. Localized versions are available in the United Kingdom, India and Australia. From early 2009 to September 2010, Current Television aired the weekly The Rotten Tomatoes Show, featuring hosts and material from the website. A shorter segment was incorporated into the weekly show, InfoMania, but it ended in 2011. In September 2013, the website introduced "TV Zone", a section for reviewing scripted TV shows.

History

Rotten Tomatoes was launched on August 12, 1998, as a spare-time project by Senh Duong. His goal in creating Rotten Tomatoes was "to create a site where people can get access to reviews from a variety of critics in the U.S." As a fan of Jackie Chan, Duong was inspired to create the website after collecting all the reviews of Chan's movies as they were being published in the United States. The first movie whose reviews were featured on Rotten Tomatoes was Your Friends & Neighbors. The website was an immediate success, receiving mentions by Yahoo!, Netscape, and USA Today within the first week of its launch; it attracted "600–1000 daily unique visitors" as a result.