Welcome to the world of tomorrow. Or, if you’re reading this two days late, welcome to yesterday. Either way, this is a rather grandiose, roundabout and sci-fi way of telling you that Rotten Tomatoes has gone global this day with the official beta launch of Rotten Tomatoes UK.
“Why should I, a tax-paying American person, care about this news?” I hear you cry. Well, you shouldn’t, necessarily. But for those of us who bow down at Helen Mirren’s throne (or something) here in the United Kingdom, this is a big deal. The web’s number one resource for all things critical in the world of film is now serving the Brits.
What does this all mean? Well aside from a swanky new logo (I take enormous amounts of pride in my abilities to take two pictures and mix them together) you can say hello to a brand new Rotten Tomatoes team, based in the hub of all that is grey and smelly – London, and a site that’ll be serving up all of the best bits of RT on a UK release schedule.
We’ll also be including a much broader spectrum of UK critics as part of our world-famous Tomatometer and you can see the fruits of our first week on the job by checking out the scores for this week’s UK cinema releases, "The Last King of Scotland", "Smokin’ Aces", "The Pursuit of Happyness" and "Ghosts".
We’re still working with the brilliantly comprehensive Rotten Tomatoes database, which means you’ll still be able to get the critical consensus on movies opening in the US too, as well as access to the enormous archive of movies going back decades. And if your favourite critic isn’t British, fear not; the Tomatometer is still tallying reviews from around the world.
For those of you familiar with the inner-workings of the Features section, you’ll already have heard the RT-UK moniker attached to interviews we’ve done recently with the likes of Tenacious D and Guillermo del Toro. That we should consider the Greatest Rock Band in the World and one of Mexican cinema’s finest exports mere trial runs should speak to the level of coverage you can expect from this section as we ramp up our operation. In the upcoming weeks expect sit-downs with Sylvester Stallone, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu and Patrick Marber to name but a few. And that’s just for starters.
Our remit at RT-UK is to continue to represent the freshest of cinema from Hollywood and the rest of the world while also shining a light on movies opening here first. And there couldn’t be a better time; the UK film industry is stronger and more active than it has ever been and we’ll be on the frontlines to introduce you to the finest of home-grown talent.
Should any of our brethren on the other side of the Atlantic – or, indeed, anywhere else in the world – want to see what all the fuss is about, you can access Rotten Tomatoes UK by throwing uk.rottentomatoes.com into your browser.
And we’re keen to hear from you to find out what you’d like to see from the site in the coming months. If you want to contact the UK team, be sure to add us to your friends list on MySpace – find us at myspace.com/rottentomatoesuk – and don’t hesitate to drop us a line by email at ukfeedback@rottentomatoes.com. We’ll also be using our (or rather my) lovely MySpace page to reach out to you with exclusive competitions and the like, so be sure to stay in touch.
Oh and we’ll also be doing crazy things like using S’s instead of Z’s and throwing in random U’s. Revolutionary stuff indeed.
