Rotten Tomatoes Wouldn't Exist Without Jackie Chan's Rush Hour

These days, for better or worse, it's hard to imagine the movie and TV industries without Rotten Tomatoes. The review aggregator has become the go-to vibe-check for the majority of audiences, as well as a huge gauge for studios of how their latest projects are faring. Some would argue that the site's binary fresh/rotten review scale is simple to the point of harming discourse, and many users still don't fully understand how Rotten Tomatoes' scores and badges actually work. That said, it's impossible to deny the site's impact, and we might not have it at all if not for the Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker-led 1998 action-comedy "Rush Hour."

As explained in a 2021 Rotten Tomatoes editorial, founder Senh Duong was a huge Jackie Chan fan. "Rush Hour" marked the actor's first major North American release, which gave Duong a thought — it was difficult to find different critical thoughts on a film all in the same place. Duong struggled to track down consolidated reviews for Chan's previous work, so he and some friends, who were already working together in the web development space, created Rotten Tomatoes in preparation for "Rush Hour."

Due to the film getting delayed, they ended up making pages for other movies first, starting with the 1998 dark comedy "Your Friends & Neighbors." After that, the first film to receive a proper Tomatometer score was "Star Trek: Insurrection."

In a blog post on his personal website, Rotten Tomatoes co-founder Stephen Wang said that the delay of "Rush Hour" may have given birth to Rotten Tomatoes, as it left time to develop the site in other ways outside of one specific movie. "Senh devoted his time to building his version of a 'fan page,'" Wang wrote. "He collected all of the news articles and film reviews in the weeks preceding the movie's release and put them on a single page. In reality, while he meant to build a site for 'Rush Hour,' since the film's release got delayed, he actually continued the process of aggregating different review quotations and news headlines for other movies about to release."

Once the site was live, though, it quickly picked up traction thanks in part to spotlights from Yahoo and USA Today. Then, Roger Ebert, arguably the biggest name in film criticism at the time, gave a positive shoutout to the site in his magazine column. That led to a whole other wave of attention within the online film fandom, and it seems fitting that an esteemed critic like Ebert had such a big role in Rotten Tomatoes becoming what it is.

In short order, the website became a major hub for movie aficionados, and years later, the de facto thermometer for anyone thinking of buying a movie ticket. And yet, it's kind of funny, given the site's history, that the Rotten Tomatoes score for "Rush Hour" isn't that high.

While Rotten Tomatoes was designed initially as a Jackie Chan fan page of sorts, and for "Rush Hour" in particular, the film in question holds a pretty middling 62% aggregate approval from critics on the site. These days, if a studio saw those numbers hitting on the night of a review embargo, it would be a big red flag for the film's future chances.

In more recent years, sentiment has turned a bit on the site because of the monopoly it's developed around Hollywood. There are plenty of reasons why you shouldn't rely solely on Rotten Tomatoes, most notably being the severe limitations of the aggregation scale. A film with 100 three-out-of-five reviews would come out with a 100% score, while film with 99 five-star reviews and a single one-star review would have a 99% score.

There's no denying that the site's scale is an effective shorthand, as is the comparison between audience and critical reviews, though review-bombing has become increasingly common with time, torpedoing the reliability on the fan side as well. The Rotten Tomatoes stranglehold is unfortunate, but it's nice to remember that the site originated as a place to truly celebrate our shared love for movies. With luck, one of these days it will become that again.