PopcornGap — the RT audience score without the push votes

Before 2019, RT made you work to rate a film.

You logged in, found the page, and submitted.

So only motivated fans bothered.

After 2019, RT switched to a "PUSH" system.

Ticket apps like Fandango ping you after the show.

ONE TAP on 1–5 ⭐, and you're done.

RT made this the headline "Popcornmeter" score.

PopcornGap subtracts those one-tap votes back out.

One subtraction, using RT's own numbers,

shows what EVERYONE ELSE thought.

The math. RT's page data lists likes and dislikes for both pools. Subtract the Verified pool out of the All pool, and what's left is the unverified "pull" crowd:

unverified_likes = all_likes − verified_likes unverified_dislikes = all_dislikes − verified_dislikes REAL score = unverified_likes / (unverified_likes + unverified_dislikes)

Worked example — The Odyssey, with the numbers from the source post:

Same movie, same day: 56.2% from the crowd that rated on its own, 97% on the page. (Votes keep coming in, so the big table shows the latest scrape, not the post's snapshot.)

Check it yourself.

1. Open any movie on rottentomatoes.com
2. Right-click → View Page Source
3. Search for media-scorecard-json
4. Compare likedCount / notLikedCount under audienceAll vs audienceVerified

Every number on this site is scraped from that block; the only math is subtraction.

Fair caveats.

• Far fewer people leave pull ratings since 2019, so small samples are noisy — films with under 30 unverified votes are excluded.
• Top 100 / year (the default view) keeps each year's 100 most-rated films — the ones people actually recognize. All films lifts that cap, and searching always looks through everything.
• The pull crowd self-selects and skews harsher. Read Real as "the score the pre-2019 system would have shown," not an absolute verdict.
• It's also the far more engaged crowd. Share of raters who bothered to write a text review, on The Odyssey:

The critic side has its own manipulation. A 2023 Vulture investigation found the PR firm Bunker 15 paid Rotten-Tomatoes-approved critics roughly $50 a review and funneled the positive ones onto the site — flipping Ophelia from 46% to 62% ("rotten" to "fresh"). In 2024 RT added a "Verified Hot" badge that leans further on Fandango-verified ratings — the same push mechanism this site strips out. Reported here.

Credit. The method and the Odyssey example come from RoryTate's post on r/KotakuInAction — he explains it better than we can, so read the full thread. See also his earlier 2000–2023 Rotten Tomatoes data analysis.

Column key. RT = the Verified Popcornmeter RT displays · Real = the unverified-only score · Gap = RT − Real · 👍/👎 = the Real crowd's raw votes. The small grey number under each score is that crowd's vote count — the push (verified) sample under RT and the pull (unverified) sample under Real. When the pull count is tiny next to the push count, read the Real score with caution.