If you made someone guess which "Scream" film has the best rating on Rotten Tomatoes, most people would pick the first one. That's the only "Scream" movie that seemingly everyone loves, whereas most people have some bones to pick with each of the sequels. And yet, "Scream" only has a score of 78% fresh. It's outdone by "Scream 2," which has an 83%. Even stranger is that the fifth and sixth "Scream" films land at 76% and 77%, respectively. They have lower scores than Wes Craven's original, yes, but the margin is slim.
To those unfamiliar with Rotten Tomatoes, this data seems to clash hard with the general consensus on the quality of these films. Most agree that the 2020s "Scream" sequels, while fun, still don't hold a candle to Craven's original. So, what gives? How did the divisive "Scream VI" pull off a score only 1% lower than the first movie?
The easiest answer is that people are misunderstanding how these RT scores work. A 78% rating is not the equivalent of a 7.8/10 rating on IMDb, because reviews on RT are sorted into two categories: positive ("fresh") or negative ("rotten"). So, if all the included critics give a movie a 7 out of 10 rating, it'd have a 100% score on the website, which would rank it higher than a movie that received more praise overall but had a few "rotten" reviews thrown into the mix.
You can see this on display with Craven's "Scream" and "Scream" (2022). The positive reviews for the former are gushing about how it reinvigorated the slasher genre, while the positive reviews for the latter say it captured some of the vibes of the first film. Both are positive sentiments, but one is clearly more positive than the other.