A Rotten Tomatoes Deep Dive Indicates ‘The Revenant’ Would Be The Worst Reviewed Best Picture Winner Of The Last 25 Years

The Academy Awards are set to air this Sunday night, February 28, and the races for the two biggest acting Oscars appear to be locked up. Should any pair other than Brie Larson and Leonardo DiCaprio walk off the Dolby Theater stage with the top performance prizes, it’d be an upset large enough to spawn a thousand thinkpieces – and probably a Change.org petition or two.

What’s less clear, though, is which of the films nominated for Best Picture should be considered the favorite. And the awards season thus hasn’t helped to clear things up.

Room kicked things off in September by winning the TIFF’s People’s Choice Award – the first of a slew of prestige awards often considered to be bellwethers for Oscars success. But since then fellow nominees The Revenant and The Martian have added their names to the list by taking home top honors at The Golden Globes for Best Drama and Best Comedy/Musical, respectively (loved that Matt Damon jazz number in the final act, btw!). Shortly after, Spotlight nabbed the Critics’ Choice Award, and then The Big Short shook things up further when it popped up to take top honors at the Producers Guild Awards.

Recently, The Revenant moved into pole position with a win at the BAFTA’s, but it’s still anyone’s game. According to Vegas odds, only three films have a shot at winning – The Revenant, Spotlight, and The Big Short – but the race may be even closer than that. So why not handicap in a different way, and determine which film is the best bet the same way any red-blooded movie-goer make their decisions on what movies to see … by asking Rotten Tomatoes who has the best shot to win.

Seeding the nominees based on where they rank on the Tomatometer in relation to one another is a good start, and it nets us a list led that’s surprisingly led in critical reception by Mad Max: Fury Road. (We’re only 15 seconds into our analysis and we’ve already got a new frontrunner, that’s exciting!)

But does it matter that it’s the #1 movie on Rotten Tomatoes? I mean, how often does the film ranked highest on the Tomatometer actually win the top prize? As it turns out, quite a bit. Let’s take a look at the past 25 years – one generation – of Oscar winners for Best Picture.

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This reads as good news for presumed no-hopers Mad Max and Brooklyn, as 56% of the time —over the last 25 years, at least— the freshest or second-freshest nominee on Rotten Tomatoes has won the top prize. Expanding further to the third-freshest, recent history tells us there’s a 76% chance that Mad Max, Brooklyn, or Spotlight will be this year’s winner.

Though, common sense probably tells us that Spotlight gobbles up most if not all of that likelihood – as it has the pedigree, subject matter, and awards track record to back up it’s Rotten Tomatoes favoritism.

Still, this data bodes well for some Vegas longshots. Here’s how the books currently rank the films’ likelihoods of winning:

And here’s how Rotten Tomatoes’ history would rank them:

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A statistical anomaly values The Martian quite low – since the fourth-best-reviewed film in the bunch has only won once, compared to the fifth-best’s five times, Room easily hops The Martian to tie Spotlight’s chances.

Under The Martian, though, the news is far grimmer. No nominee ranked fifth or worse among its class has ever won Best Picture.

Much of that can be blamed on a narrow category – before 2009, nominees for Best Picture were limited to five. That increased to a mandatory 10 nominees in 2009, and later settled at “at least five, but no more than 10” in 2011.

But in those six years of additional opportunity, the field has actually skewed more predictable – as each winner since the expansion has come from one of the top three Tomatometer seeds. And while it truly is an honor just to be nominated, the expanded field has perhaps spread the vote out too thin, and so far has resulted only in more instantly-obvious consolation prizes.

So what of the two films whose fortunes seem to have flipped for the worse by this analysis – The Big Short and The Revenant?

Well, the good news for The Big Short is that it already quacks like a contender. It’s scored at an 88%, just 1-percentage-point shy of our 25-year average for winners of 89%, and the PGA winner has gone on to take the Oscar 18 times in the last 25 years. It’s a bonafide contender at this point.

Not so for The Revenant. Just how long are The Revenant’s odds? In a word – loooooooooong.

At 82%, The Revenant is the worst-reviewed of the nominees by a good margin – in fact, The Big Short is the only other nominee under 90% on the Tomatometer scale, and you have to go back to 2005 to find a winner that failed to reach that critical threshold.

An 82% Fresh winner isn’t unprecedented, though. Dances With Wolves won with that exact score in 1990. But each class of nominees is different, and comparing the two film’s scores outright doesn’t give us the whole story.

When Dances With Wolves won, it did so against a comparitively weak class comprised of Awakenings (88%), Ghost (74%), The Godfather Part III (67%), and GoodFellas (96%). Against that crop’s mean rating of 81.4%, Dances is barely an upset at all – it was actually better than average.

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And 2015’s nominee class is historically strong, earning an average score of 92.6%. This means that not only would The Revenant be the sixth-worse-reviewed winner in the last 25 years, it would also have to overcome the third-greatest margin against it’s class to win this year’s trophy. The only films who overcame greater margins? Forrest Gump and Braveheart.

And perhaps that’s our cue to throw out the math entirely. Is The Revenant simply the kind of underrated film that overcomes long odds to be remembered by history as best-in-class? One that features an inimitable performance by a star in their prime – Hanks, Gibson, and DiCaprio – playing the kind of underestimated character – Gump, Wallace, and Glass – that overcomes long odds to be remembered by history as iconic?

It’s certainly possible. If Rotten Tomatoes is to be believed, it won’t be easy. By at least one metric, it’d be the greatest outlier of its generation.

Kevin McGraw is a copywriter and creative strategist living in Chicago. Everyday that he wakes up and the original soundtrack to Josie and the Pussycats isn’t on Spotify is a bad day. Follow him on Twitter at @fkashark.