Lady Bird Is the Best-Reviewed Movie In Rotten Tomatoes History

Rotten Tomatoes isn’t a perfect site. Far too many people think that a movie’s score is a direct “grade,” indicating exactly how enjoyable a movie is. The Brett Ratners of the world love to blame RT for everything wrong with the film industry. However, even if you’re not a fan of the aggregate nature of a site like Rotten Tomatoes, the word-of-mouth element can be extraordinarily useful. Lady Bird is great proof of that.

Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf, has not only earned a nearly impossible 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but it’s now made history as the best-reviewed movie in the site’s history. The previous record holder was Toy Story 2, which had 100% with 163 reviews. Lady Bird has a 100% rating with, as of this writing, 170 reviews.

Now, obviously, the “best-reviewed” movie is not automatically the same thing as the “best movie” of all time. But this is still monumental. I will always hold that sites like Rotten Tomatoes, while flawed, are important because they’re a giant source of word-of-mouth recommendations.

Lady Bird isn’t even in wide release yet. It had the best limited opening of the year, a title previously held by The Big Sick. It’s now expanded from its original four theaters to a few hundred, and by the time it opens wide, it’s already gathered the steam to be on tons of must-watch lists, not to mention the awards season track. This is a beautiful movie, but a coming of age story about a lower-middle class girl and her relationship with her mother is exactly the sort of film that so often flies under the mainstream radar. Thanks to this kind of early aggregate attention, a lot more people are going to choose to seek this one out.

(via Collider, image: A24)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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