Rotten Tomatoes: "The Prequels were better reviewed than the Classic Trilogy."

Often when discussing the critical reaction towards the Star Wars films, people will bring up the current Rotten Tomatoes "fresh rating" of the individual films to make their case that critics loved the Classic Trilogy a lot more than the Prequels. The problem is that the current Rotten Tomatoes stats not only include reviews from the OT's original release, but also the ones from it's '97 re-release. Furthermore, they had to remove many of the original reviews due to copyright violations, further skewing the end results in the Classic Trilogy's favor.

This article appeared on Rotten Tomatoes around the time ROTS was released.

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Critical Consensus: ?Star Wars? Prequels Actually Better Reviewed Than Originals
Posted by Senh Duong on Thursday, May. 19, 2005, 03:59 PM

Senh Duong writes: "The results are not what one might expect, based on reviews collected during the time of each trilogy?s original release dates.

Based on current active critics though, the results are as expected. The average Tomatometer of the original trilogy handily beats the prequels by 20% -- 90% to 70%, respectively.

Prequels Tomatometer Scores Based on Current Active Critics:
83% - Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
65% - Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
62% - Star wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Average Tomatometer: 70%

Original Trilogy Tomatometer Scores Based on Current Active Critics:
80% - Return of the Jedi
98% - The Empire Strikes Back
93% - Star Wars
Average Tomatometer: 90%

However, as user ?Knelt? noted in our News section, it?s not fair to compare the two trilogies based mostly on current active critics because most of them saw ?the original films as children, and are reviewing them based on nostalgic memories as well as judging them on established ?classic? status.?

When ?Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace? was released in 1999, a group of us actually went to our local library and dug up a sampling of available sources that reviewed the original trilogy during the time of their respective release dates in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Because those reviews weren?t available online, we OCR-ed them and put them on the web, breaking all kinds of copyright laws in the process. We were quite the rebels back then. However, when we legitimized the company months later, those reviews were the first to go. Thanks to Archive.org, a site that archives the web pages, the quotes are still there but the full text reviews are gone. The results are actually quite surprising.

Tomatometer Scores for Original Trilogy During Original Release Dates:
(Click on the links for the archived quotes from Archive.org)
31% - Return of the Jedi
52% - The Empire Strikes Back
79% - Star Wars
Average Tomatometer: 54%

As one can see, only ?Star Wars? managed to be Fresh, with a respectable 79% on the Tomatometer, while the other two sequels got successively worse. Most of the critics thought the first film was an inventive, fun, and entertaining summer popcorn movie. It?s interesting that they complain about the dialogue back then too. ?Empire,? which is regarded as the best of the series nowadays, only managed to score a mixed 52%. It received great technical grades, but critics had problems with the plot, one way or other, and thought it was just ?minor entertainment.? It got worse with ?Jedi? ? uneven pacing, no character development, tired acting, and hollow and junky filmmaking. It scored a moldy 30% on the Tomatometer. Prequels were probably the last thing critics wanted back then after the thrashing of the last film.

Ironically, if you compare the average Tomatometer of the prequels and the original trilogies during the time of their respective original release dates, the Prequels are actually better reviewed by 16% -- 70% to 54%, respectively!

Tomatometer Ranking of Star Wars Series Based on Critical Reaction During Original Release Dates:
83% - Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
79% - Star War

 

I've been meaning to do a dedicated article to dispel this, but that study is in fact a myth. The prequels were actually reviewed much worse than the originals. I don't think thats news--most people are shocked when you tell them about the results of the above study because it seems to fly in the face of the collective public's memory.

I think perhaps the study's random sampling was simply too low. How many reviews did they sample? Maybe ten per film? I don't know, but I'm betting that it was something like that and that they coincidentally landed a sampling of somewhat lower reviews. Another thing to consider is subjectivity: most movie reviews before the 1990's did not have a star system or a rating system, so when rottentomatoes accounts for these its the opinion of the editor to assign a review a rating, based on the tone and content of the review; perhaps they leaned to the conservative side (for example, if a review summed up saying that ESB was a good movie but had story flaws and a lack of humor, the RT editor of the study might assign it a 68% score, when really a 75% score is more accurate).

My own research has found that the study is about 10% lower for the OT. Star Wars' rating is pretty close--off-hand, I'd say it averages to about 85%, maybe 88%. ESB, while indeed facing criticism, is way too low at 50%, based on my own research it should be batting somewhere in the 70-75% zone. Return of the Jedi, while indeed getting some bad reviews, also found some strong ones, such as Roger Ebert who proclaimed that it was amazing how Lucas kept topping himself. ROTJ should be somewhere in the 60% zone (31%?? I don't even think Gigli got that low a score).

So my research has given me:
Star Wars 85%
Empire 75%
Return of the Jedi 60%

These figures are approximate since I haven't actually put together a formal written piece on my own study. But I think most people will find that these figures better reflect the memories of reviews and reactions in 1977, 1980, and 1983. If we take my figures here we end up with an average of 73%. That in itself is not wildly greater than the PT average, but then each trilogy is conversely dragged way down and way up because of one film--without ROTS, the PT only gets 63%, while without ROTJ the OT gets 80%.

 

I find this fascinating. Go-Mer, thanks for posting it. To be clear, we should stress that the researchers culled what appears to be a random sampling of available reviews from the period under review. The data could be skewed as a result; but even if it is, it's reasonable to conclude that the margin of error is low. What are the odds that this random sampling would accidentally lean heavily toward negative critical response? It's mathematically logical that a random sampling would reflect a larger pattern and be more or less equivalent (within, say 5-10% at most) with a full sampling.

Even given a 15% margin or error, those numbers are still pretty darn low. As a young child I was ignorant of reviews of 'ANH' and ESB, but I remember at 13 being stunned by the poor reviews ROTJ got all over town. The explanation resides in the fact that genre films simply were not accepted by the intelligentsia, from among whom film critics were culled in those days. Science fiction and fantasy films were considered kiddie fare and not worth consideration over or even alongside more mature dramatic material.

'ANH's 79% is actually extremely respectable for a genre film in those days, which the Academy openly acknowledged when it nominated the film for so many Oscars that year.

EDIT: Zombie, thanks for the rebuttal. You make some good points to counter the quoted numbers, but I will add that ROTJ was indeed a low scorer, even among genre fans: the reviews in Cinefantastique and Starlog (which I still own) were underwhelmed and dismissive in tone. I think Siskel and Ebert were among the minority of proponents of the final episode.

 

I can only speak for Germany - I remember very clearly Star Wars receiving very poor reviews in most of the "serious" press (news magazines "Der Spiegel" and "Die Zeit", most notably, come to mind). Sci-Fi Trash, glorification of war, black-and-white mentality, childish storytelling was what the movies, especially the original Star Wars, were accused of. 15 years later, when the Special Edition came out, all of a sudden the same magazines lauded them as classics. So that rottentomatoes study reflects my own experience quite well.

 

But are all critics equal? If that hardass Pauline Kael actually liked Empire, shouldn't that be more impressive than some dude on a website raving about Attack of the Clones? Roger Ebert, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Academy/Golden globes, Time, the big L.A. and New York papers etc., if we're gonna give ANY weight to the critical reaction (and I'm not sure we should, critics often miss the boat with sci-fi) shouldn't we look at the big snooty "institutions" of film criticism?

 

I would just like to point out that the study is not "in fact a myth" as Zombie claims.

It's in fact a real study.

He can write another book about how he knows "the real" story, but I don't think he could could do any research that would discount this particular article's findings.

All he could really say about it is that this flies in the face of his memories from way back when.

 

Go-Mer, that's a good point: The study itself is not a "myth", it is an actual documented bit of research (unless we care to dispute the researchers' claim that the study was performed at all, which seems unproductive).

What zombie is saying, though, is that that study must have been skewed (by about 10%, which is a resonable margin or error for a random sampling). Evidently he has his own research materials to back up this claim, not simply his memory of the critical response to the films -- which at all events, I believe I'm correct in saying, zombie isn't old enough to have experienced first-hand.

 

No, I did my own study using roughly 150 reviews from 1977-1983, sourced from majors like Rolling Stone and Time and down to small-time critics like local town newspapers.

Do you really think ROTJ scored 33%? Here are some comparisons: the maligned Spiderman 3 scored twice that, 62%. I would say ROTJ's criticism is analogous to Spiderman 3, and in fact ROTJ actually recieved a rating around 60% according to my own research. Other comparible duds: the critically panned box-office flop Starship Troopers gets 60%, Polar Express scores 57%, Bee Movie gets 57%, the critically panned X Men: Last Stand gets 57%, Ang Lee's Hulk flop gets 61%. Movies with a score lower than 33% are films like Fantastic Four, Saw III, Godzilla, and Wild Wild West. I know Return of the Jedi had a lot of criticism, but not on the level of being a complete bomb the way Godzilla was, it's more comparable to the Hulk or Spiderman 3, that is it had a lot of people that thought it sucked, most thought it was simply dissapointing, and some that thought it was worth seeing (and the odd one that thought it was great).

 

Can you post the full scope and results of your study Zombie?

 

I did, see above. Those figures are only approximate, as I haven't had time to put together a more detailed report. I wish I could provide better backing right now but I guess you'll just have to trust that I am not making up numbers (the same as the people who did the original study).

 

Well, we can go back using Archive Org and see how they derive their results.

I'd love to see you put this all together so it's more than you just saying you did all this research, but I don't particularly distrust you.

 

Actually, RT is just guys saying "we researched this and this is what we found." Using Archive doesn't show you the ratings because none of the reviews survived online. They are to be trusted because they are a reliable source of information. What I am saying, however, is that the scope of their study must have been too limited to give accurate results, because what I found when I did my own independent study was that their figures were way off. I'll post a more detailed account of my findings one day, but I would like to think that I would not be accused of making up numbers here, though of course until I do give some better data I guess you shouldn't take my word as absolute, but I don't think its fair to dismiss it.

 

It's not fair of us to dismiss it outright, but by the same token you should not expect us to accept your figures as especially persuasive, when you haven't done an actual accounting of the reviews, and are basing your percentages on a decidedly unscientific "guesstimate" of what you believe the numbers will show when you actually get around to calculating them.

 

Its more accurate than a guess of what I expect they will show, I've tallied up about 2/3 of them already and thats the picture they are showing. Again, I understand that this is not exactly the best source in that I'm just saying "this is what I've found", all I'm saying is don't take the RT study as gospel because, for what its worth, I've found reason to doubt its accuracy.

 

Fair enough, then. A 2/3 sampling should present a pretty accurate picture of the general trend and is at least as valid as the RT "random sampling" Go-Mer cites in his opening post.

 

I certainly don't mean to dismiss your research, I was just hoping for more detail.

I think that if you go back using Archive Org as RT did, you can see the blurbs from all the reviews (not the full reviews) along with each review's rating, from which they devised their numbers.

 

Guys/Gals surly you can understand how this is flawed.

A person can not go to a library and get a handfull of reviews and crunch those numbers and spit out a % and claim it to be an accurate account of the critics of an entire countrie or multiple countries opinon on a film.

Please think on this. If I went to a grocery store and took 5 cans of soup out of 500 and 2 of those cans were good and 3 were bad I can not turn around and say 3 out of every 5 cans at the entire store is bad. I would need to take the entire 500 cans and review them.

The person who did this at rotten tomato does not even give the details of his findings or the numbers he used to base this on.

For all we know all he found was 10 or 20 reviews and out of those 10 or 20 he found half or over half to be negative reviews.

You can't use that. It defies logic.

TO my fellow poster that said a stars system was not in in place in the mid early 80's. That is false. I always loved to read the reviews of my favorite films as a kid and see how many stars they receivied.

I remember Arthur with dudley moore getting 4 stars. I remember 9 to 5 with dolly parton getting 3 stars. rambo 2 getting 1 star. I always looked at these things.

Siskel and eberts original review from 1980 of the empire strikes back is on youtube.

here is their original review of return of the jedi from 1983 http://youtube.com/watch?v=WA-1WV99Gug&feature=related

This entire discussion is based on this guy that went to the library and grabed a certain number and crunched numbers. It is illogical and unscientific and how anyone can buy into it is beyond me. My reasoning above explains how.

 

It was in place, but not as common; today pretty much every review carries a rating of some kind, but back before the mid-late 80's it was more common to simply write a review about what you thought of the film.

If you click on the links on the page you can actually see the amount he sampled. Star Wars has about 14, Empire about 20 and Return of the Jedi about 15. While this is better than simply a handful, it pales in comparison to the dozens that the prequels have (13 pages worth for ROTS versus 1 page for the OT films!). Another thing to consider is the source--the prequel reviews draw from online sources as well, in fact this seems to account for almost a majority percentage, they have reviews from sources like rec.arts.movies, CHUD and Dark Horizons, which is an entirely different sort of audience/critic than the OT's assortment of Newsweek, Washington Post and the like.

Rottentomatoes has a balancing feature for this--you can select "top critics", which filters out stuff like joblo.com, efilmcritic and CHUD and just leaves the majors like Rolling Stone, Time, and Chicago Tribune, you know the more legit and influential sources.

A very interesting thing happens here: Revenge of the Sith's proud 80% drops to a paltry 68%. The other films change accordingly as well. We ought to be using these figures to compare to the OT, since the OT only has a "top critic" selection. Lets compare apples to apples here.

Using this more legit sampling we get the following figures:

-Phantom Menace: 40%
-Attack of the Clones: 37%
-Revenge of the Sith: 68%

Which averages out to 48%. This more accurately reflects the reaction and reviews we all read from 1999-2005, which were very disappointed in TPM, thought AOTC had embarrassing acting and writing, but were surprised to find ROTS was worth watching.

Again, you see how slanted this study was.

 

I just think it's interesting that Rotten Tomatoes' "fresh rating" was brought up by latverian33 to explain that Empire had a 98% fresh rating, but when I point out that back in the day it had a 52% fresh rating on the same site (when not considering the '97 reviews) suddenly this is a flawed way to support an argument?

As far as comparing apples to apples, I don't see why we should filter out all but the top critics for the prequels.

I don't see how any one reviewer is "more legit" than the next.

This study I've linked to is not based on "some guy" who went to the library and got a few reviews. We are talking about the guys who created Rotten Tomatoes.

Back in 1999 they went to the library and got their hands on -every- review for the classic trilogy they could find. That's how they populated their pages with reviews back before they legitimized the company. It is no different than what we see on the website today, only it contained many more reviews from back in the day.

He used Archive.org to look at the classic trilogy pages on Rotten Tomatoes before they had to pull most of the early reviews, and found these results.

It's true that ESB and ROTJ got worse receptions than ANH. And it's true that in 97 suddenly all the critics felt they were classics.

While it's remarkable that it turns out the prequels were better reviewed than the classic trilogy overall, the other thing is that in time, critics and fans alike will come to appreciate the prequels much better as well.

 

I citied rotten for giving empire a 98%. Indeed I did.

That score came from the top critics in the country.


That is different than someone taking...(and this are the exact numbers) Star Wars has about 14, Empire about 20 and Return of the Jedi about 15.


How can you take 20 or 15 reviews out of over a 1000 from 1980 and 1983 and crunch numbers with those and give an accurate presentation of what the over all opinon was about ESB and ROTJ?

How?

Go-Mer I would really appreciate it if you would explain to me in detail how I or anyone else can take 20 reviews out of a 1000 and give a score and present that as the over all opinon out of the entire 1000.

Here is a site that has between 250-300 reviews of each film. The originals get nothing but top marks while the prequels get bashed. http://www.fwfr.com/display.asp?ID=22

Don't stop there. Google search reviews for the originals and then google search reviews for the PT. the difference in what you will find is as clear as night and day. The proof is in the pudding and the facts are there for everyone to see and read.

Go-mer can claim the prequels were better reviewed and liked and he bases that off of 15-20 reviews out of a 1000. If that is not someone that is desperate to back up his own personal opinon then I don't know what is.

But back to my question and please Go-Mer answer this...."Go-Mer I would really appreciate it if you would explain to me in detail how I or anyone else can take 20 reviews out of a 1000 and give a score and present that as the over all opinon out of the entire 1000."

 

I think there are a lot more people reviewing movies these days, and much easier ways to compile them.

 

latverian33, how many of the reviews on that link you provided came from before 1997?

And where did you get the impression Rotten Tomatoes only sampled 15-20 reviews back then?

 

Because you can see the exact number on the link page. ANH has 14, ESB 20 and ROTJ 15. If we use the same sources for the prequels--Rolling Stone, Time, Chicago Tribune, etc--then we end up with a 48% average for the PT. So no, in a comparison study the PT is not better reviewed.

 

I'm afraid I do trust RT's findings more than yours.

 

As zombie said it shows how many reviews that person used from the library.

As as far as how mnay reviews came from that site before 1997 does not matter. You can't say with scientfic fact that everyone that reviews the OT well now disliked it when it originally came out. That's assumption on your part.

You seem to like to hold to views and opinons that are not based in fact but rather opinon.

Go-Mer will you please answer my question?

...."Go-Mer I would really appreciate it if you would explain to me in detail how I or anyone else can take 20 reviews out of a 1000 and give a score and present that as the over all opinon out of the entire 1000."