Even though the website remains a popular way for Americans to rate movies, read reviews, and understand how a movie has been received in a surface manner, Rotten Tomatoes has a flawed system that doesn’t give a completely honest representation of a movie’s importance and quality. The website has also had much controversy in recent years due to stark critic and audience score differences, a supposed manipulation of scores for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and the demographics of the reviewers. Just as in the olden days when movie-goers used newspaper and magazine publications featuring critics’ reviews to get a feel for an upcoming movie’s worth, Rotten Tomatoes is often used by fans as an indication to see the movie or not. Rotten Tomatoes launched in 1998, creating a platform where American audiences could access movie reviews from a wide array of critics. Related: Mank True Story: How William Randolph Hearst Reacted To Citizen Kane Considering there were much fewer reviewers in the 1940s and 50s when most of the movies on the Rotten Tomatoes 100% list were released, it’s not an honest metric because they could just as well have the same or better consensus. Every other movie on the list has over 40 reviews to give it a more accurate summation, but it still is an extremely small size when attempting to reflect the feelings of the movie-going population and film professionals. The only reason Paddington 2 is the top movie on Rotten Tomatoes is by virtue of having the most reviews congregated for the score than the other 100% club movies. The 100% rated list includes movies like 12 Angry Men (1957), Robin Hood (1938), Before Sunrise (1995), Frankenstein (1931), The Terminator (1984), Toy Story (1995) and, you guessed it, Paddington 2. However, the Uproxx article and the current Rotten Tomatoes discussion disregard that several other films share a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Though it became a conversation point because of more widely regarded films dropping in ratings, Paddington 2 has actually had the best-reviewed spot on Rotten Tomatoes since its release. Citizen Kanehas lost its perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, with an 80-year-old negative review causing it to drop from 100% to 99%, but that mostly just shows the problems with the website’s rating system. It was noted by Uproxx that the 2017 children’s movie sequel, Paddington 2, was now the top ranked movie ahead of Citizen Kane (1941), which has been regarded by many film critics and the American Film Institute as the greatest film of all time.

Taken 3 rotten tomatoes