dePopcornmeter Autor: Duncan Wade

Thank you to Reddit user RoryTate for sparking this idea with their Reddit thread.

Rotten Tomatoes' user scores can be wrong, but you wouldn't know because they are often inflated by the "Verified Audience" metric in the Popcornmeter. According to RoryTate, users who purchased a ticket via ticket processors like Fandango are given a push notification to rate the film.

This process, which was introduced in 2019, is done in one tap as opposed to the previous "pull" mechanic; users who wanted to rate a film had to actively decide to leave a review and write their thoughts. This sometimes leads to overinflated scores, as the verified audience are just giving a rating as they leave the theater, not people who sat down and thought critically about the film they saw.

dePopcornmeter corrects this score inflation by using the method RoryTate explained; Pull JSON data in the page for a film, subtract the verified ratings from the total ratings, and calculate the percentage of positive unverified ratings.

Unlike the website PopcornGap and other extensions, dePopcornmeter replaces the score on the front page and collapse bar with the calculated rating, correcting the inflated Popcornmeter with the ratings of people who actually wrote a review.

See the source code at https://github.com/Dunkahoop/dePopcornmeter-extension