Brett Ratner knows all about what it is like to get bad reviews for a movie. Ratner directed the movie "X-Men: The Last Stand," widely considered to be the worst film in the entire "X-Men" franchise, and one that was panned by the critics. That makes it no surprise to learn that Ratner was critical of the critical aggregate known as rotten tomatoes when he spoke a the Sun Valley Film Festival in Idaho.

Brett Ratner's Rotten Tomatoes complaints

Interestingly, while Brett Ratner has been the subject of scathing critical reviews in the past, he is not against critics and actually complimented them when talking about Rotten Tomatoes.

According to Ratner, he grew up loving to read film criticism by Pauline Kael, someone who seemed to take pleasure in destroying Movies that she disliked but was a brilliant and intelligent writer who made her points clear and defended her arguments eloquently. It isn't even the film critics who pan movies online now that Ratner dislikes. Instead, it is the way that Rotten Tomatoes gives out scores that irritate the filmmaker. In his speech, he said that decent movies end up losing audience members because people will look and see what the Rotten Tomatoes score is and then decide if a movie is good or bad based on the score alone.

Rotten Tomatoes as an inaccurate rating device

Brett Ratner has a good point when blasting Rotten Tomatoes as something that people put too much credit in when looking at scores of movies.

Critics base their movie scores on their own criteria and then explain why the movie doesn't work for them in their reviews. They score the movie either on a scale from 1-10 or possibly on a star scale using four or five stars. All critics scores are averaged based on their scales and if a movie falls below 50-percent, the movie is deemed "rotten." Ratner pointed out "Batman V Superman" as a movie that received a rotten score on the site but was still successful.

However, he also points out that there are movies that are really good that have rotten score based on the differing opinions of critics. As Brett Ratner said, the only way to really know what a critical review of a movie means is by reading the review and not by looking at a score that really means nothing at all.