The Emoji Movie Barely Avoids 0% Rotten Tomatoes Score - But Still Pulls In The Tickets

Graham Pierrepoint

Anyone following movie news or who has a passing interest in what’s on at the cinema these days will likely be aware that a highly controversial family film is in our midst – The Emoji Movie, a feature-length animation based around the popular sprites that can be used in texting and instant messaging to convey emotion. Quite how a concept for giving emoji their own movie remains a tale that director and writer Tony Leondis will keenly tell – but for many adults, the approaching release date has caused something of a stir. So too, has the movie – which appears to be garnering a reputation for being one of the worst overall-received pictures in recent history.

More and more people are trusting Rotten Tomatoes – the web’s leading critical analysis aggregator – to provide a solid ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on whether a movie is worth watching. The so-called ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ effect has effectively damaged certain movies’ performances at the box office in recent years – this year alone, movies such as the poorly-received Baywatch and The Mummy – both of which received fairly low scoring here at One News Page – have felt the box office pinch as a result of the dreaded Tomatometer.

Rotten Tomatoes pulls together critical reviews from hundreds of different sources and analyses how many of them can be classed as positive. The final percentage score is how many critics, from those collated, rated the movie as above mediocre. At the time of writing, The Emoji Movie sits at 6% approval. For fans of One News Page, last year’s most infamous animated outings, Top Cat Begins and Norm of The North, poll in at 17% and 9% respectively. In Top Cat’s case, this may be due to a lack of wider release – but the critical drubbing The Emoji Movie has been receiving appears to be fairly unprecedented for an animated movie, at least for some time.

The movie has, however, overseen a healthy $25 million opening weekend domestically, despite coming in second to the masterful war epic Dunkirk – meaning that there is either no accounting for taste, or that the Tomatometer doesn’t always work on certain audiences. How long the magic will last, however, remains to be seen – as the movie opens up to more international audiences over the coming weeks. To prepare, why not read our review? Or, alternatively – a better suggestion – why not take the kids to see Captain Underpants instead?

Read our review of The Emoji Movie in Graham's Movie Reviews section here on One News Page.