Rotten Tomatoes recently released its list of the 100 Best Films of the 21st Century, and more often than not, the results equate artistic quality with popularity. That alone should nullify the rankings, as it has yielded 10 animated mega-hits in the top 15 movies released since 2000. Worse yet, the inclusion of the 2011 Best Picture Winner, The King’s Speech, has completely sapped all credibility from a list that claims to balance art and commerce but ignores originality, timeless artistic merit, and cultural cachet.
Not only is RT’s ranking formula flawed, combining the tastes of critics and general movie lovers at once, but it also gives far more weight to movies that have higher viewership than others. While a good handful of truly inspired works of art indeed belong on the list, the vast majority are family-friendly movies that were embraced by droves of theatergoers. Here’s why Rotten Tomatoes has gotten its list of 100 Best Movies of the 21st century completely wrong.
Rotten Tomatoes’ Ranking Formula
In determining the best movies released in the past 25 years, RT has created a formula that instantly excludes countless titles from consideration. According to the website:
“How are the movies ranked? First, every movie here is Certified Fresh. Then we applied our recommendation formula, which considers a movie’s Tomatometer rating with assistance from your votes on the Popcornmeter, illuminating beloved sentiment from all sides. Critics-certified, audience-approved!
Other factors weighing into the recommendation formula: a movie’s number of critics reviews, the number of Popcornmeter votes, and its year of release. An editorial pass is reserved to finesse the final list, which includes minimum thresholds for each of the data categories.”
The exclusivity begins with only Certified Fresh titles, instantly disqualifying outstanding movies that narrowly missed the mark. The rankings get fuzzier by trying to account for critics’ sentiment and general moviegoers’ opinions at once. But the real issue has to do with the number of critics’ reviews and user reviews, disproportionately benefiting movies that attracted more eyeballs than others.
Therefore, forgettable wide-release big-budget blockbusters and PG-rated animated family films shoot to the front of the line, while smaller indie releases seen by far fewer viewers are short shrift. The result is the same: the more popular a movie’s viewership, the higher the ranking. That’s how the list yields only five live-action movies in the Top 15.
Why ‘The King’s Speech Doesn’t Deserve Inclusion
One of the least deserving Best Picture winners in the last 15 years, The King’s Speech robbed David Fincher’s The Social Network at the Academy Awards. A stuffy period piece that plays more like a broad comedy of manners than a serious historical drama, the story charts King George VI’s desperate attempt to shore up his verbal stammer ahead of WWII. With the country in need of a confident and competent leader in uncertain times, George is assigned to undergo speech therapy sessions with Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian linguist, to deliver rousing radio speeches ahead of the war.
While amusing enough in the moment, The King’s Speech is a wildly overrated, instantly forgettable tale marked by episodic slapstick comedy. Set in 1936-1939, it is not a movie of the times, nor does it speak to pressing societal issues of the day. And in terms of technical craft, it does not approach the lasting artistic brilliance of Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher’s The Social Network, a three-time Oscar winner that won Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score.
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Even RT agrees, ranking The Social Network #40 (still too low), 16 spots ahead of The King’s Speech. The Social Network is a movie of the times, one that reflects the cultural zeitgeist more than nearly every other listed film. With a few exceptions beyond reproach, these are the types of films that truly deserve to be ranked among the best of the 21st century. Seriously, who’s watching The King’s Speech in 2025? Meanwhile, The Social Network Part II is currently being written by Sorkin, with Fincher eyed to direct.
Movies That Deserved To Be on the List
The King’s Speech‘s unworthy inclusion and the list being top-heavy with popular animated films aside, undeniably great movies were left off because they didn’t gain as many critics and user reviews. For instance, the Coen Brothers’ 2007 Best Picture Winner, No Country for Old Men, is not on the list, but their True Grit remake sits at #93. No serious movie watcher would ever rank True Grit above No Country. Ever.
Sticking with 2007 alone, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is nowhere to be found on the list; another glaring travesty that saps all credibility. Not a single Martin Scorsese movie is included on RT’s list, despite the greatest living American director making 10 acclaimed features this century. Instead, because they gained more positive critical and user reviews, undeserving movies like A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and Brooklyn outrank much better fare like The Wolf of Wall Street and The Departed.
Beyond the spate of silly cartoon movies (Puss in Boots 2 ranked #72?), curious entries on the list include Creed, John Wick 4, Casino Royale, Star Trek, Iron Man, and others, proving that popularity outweighs all else. While fun, entertaining, and rewatchable, you could easily argue that these movies should not rank among the 100 best movies made since 2000. By contrast, some truly great and original movies that meaningfully reflect the world have made the list, though far too few.
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Movies that honestly deserve a spot on the list include Parasite (#1), Spotlight, Spirited Away, Toy Story 3, Inside Out, Get Out, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Pianist, The Social Network, 12 Years a Slave, Pan’s Labyrinth, Memento, Whiplash, A Prophet, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Boyhood, Lost in Translation, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, Oppenheimer, In The Mood for Love, and arguably a few others.
It’s no surprise that the litany above includes the work of the most talented movie directors around, be they Bong Joon Ho, Hayao Miyazaki, Jordan Peele, Ang Lee, Roman Polanski, David Fincher, Steve McQueen, Guillermo del Toro, Christopher Nolan, Jacques Audiard, Richard Linklater, Sofia Coppola, Peter Jackson, Wong Kar-wai, and others.
Remember who directed The King’s Speech? Tom Hooper, the man who gave the world 2019’s Cats and has since been demoted to directing Chevrolet commercials. Not to beat a man while he’s down, but The King’s Speech is just one glaring example of how off RT’s ranking formula is and how inaccurate the yielded results are as a consequence.
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