Critical reviews for Spider-Man: No Way Home are starting to trickle onto review sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. On Rotten Tomatoes, a site that is notorious for its skewed scoring, the lack of audience reviews has culminated in an almost unheard-of event: No Way Home has a 100% score.
That means that every single review that has hit the site — 46 as of this article’s writing — is favorable. No single critic has deemed the film bad or even mediocre, giving No Way Home the unique and lofty opportunity to hold a coveted position among Rotten Tomatoes’ top-rated releases.
The film officially releases in theaters on Dec. 17, which means that the 100% score is almost sure to be short-lived. Once audience reviews start hitting the site, the score will shift to a more nuanced level, as some viewers are certain to be disappointed. Despite the hype surrounding the film, it’s impossible to make everyone happy.
The formula behind Rotten Tomatoes allows both critics and audiences to submit reviews for a range of popular releases, from feature films to video games and individual television episodes. By allowing audiences to join official reviewers, the site allows a far more wide-reaching net to catch the opinions and impressions of viewers, but also invites trolls. As a result, many releases end up with oddly skewed audience ratings based on the whims of the internet—something as small as a well-clad female character can make ratings plummet on the site.
Thankfully, audience ratings don’t affect an entry’s overall Tomatometer score, but a negative audience score still affects viewers perception of a release.
Despite this, it is one of the most popular review aggregation sites on the internet. When people want to know what’s good in entertainment, Rotten Tomatoes is usually their first stop. And until new scores come in to knock it from its pedestal, No Way Home has the unique honor of being one of the exceedingly rare 100% listings on the site.
One or two releases join No Way Home in its coveted position at the top of Rotten Tomatoes, but none of them were released in the last decade. Or the last five decades. In fact, the most recent fully-reviewed 100% entry among the site’s top 50 films is Seven Samurai, a film that was released more than 60 years ago.
Reviews for No Way Home are largely vague, seeing as audiences have yet to lay eyes on the film, but emphasize the movie’s exciting and challenging premise. Variety reviewer Peter Debruge called the film “a consistently entertaining superhero entry” that manages to tie up “two decades’ of loose ends” throughout its runtime.
Multiple reviewers hailed the film as “the best of the MCU Trilogy” and “the finest wall-crawling MCU effort to date,” with Insider‘s Kirsten Acuna raving that it is “easily a film you’ll want to watch again.” She also notes that it is “a marvel that something this ambitious came together.”
No Way Home will arrive in theaters on Dec. 17.
Published: Dec 14, 2021 09:54 am