The Rotten Tomatoes website, created in 1999, aggregates reviews from hundreds of newspapers and websites across the country, converts each review into a thumbs-up (“fresh”) or thumbs-down (“rotten”) rating, and then combines those assessments into a single “Tomatometer” rating that gives the percentage of positive reviews. The site even aggregates archived reviews from films that were released in the 1990s and before. Whether you’re looking at contemporary cinema or the classics, the Tomatometer can serve as shorthand for a film’s critical reception, if not its box office success.
Christopher Beam and Jeremy Singer-Vine of Slate Magazine have taken Rotten Tomatoes data and made some fascinating tools.
For example:
With that in mind, use Slate’s Hollywood Career-o-Matic tool below to map the career of any major actor or director from the last 26 years. You can also type in more than one name to plot careers side by side. For example, Paul Thomas Anderson vs. Wes Anderson vs. Pamela Anderson. Mouse over the data points to see which movies they represent.