Eternals is the first Marvel movie to not earn a "Fresh" score on Rotten Tomatoes, and it could have a big impact on how future MCU films are reviewed. Eternals currently stands at 47%, a whole 19 points lower than Thor: The Dark World and that new franchise low point could mean a big change for the Rotten Tomatoes scores of future MCU movies.

The MCU had a perfect record on Rotten Tomatoes for the 25 movies preceding Eternals. While the 85% average is impressive, there's a clear disparity in critical opinion between the top-rated films and the movies at the bottom of the Fresh range like The Incredible Hulk and Thor: The Dark World.

Related: The Most Overrated Movies in the MCU (According to Rotten Tomatoes)

Reviews are all subjective, and Rotten Tomatoes is far from a perfect system, so this doesn't mean Eternals is an inherently bad movie because of low reviews; however Rotten Tomatoes does still play a big part in film discourse, especially with the MCU's pre-Eternals perfect streak, so Eternals, and any impact it has on other MCU reviews, could have a big impact on how we perceive Rotten Tomatoes and vice versa.

Eternals Reviews Give the MCU a New Rotten Tomatoes Low Point

Eternals Rotten Tomatoes

Thanks to Eternals, the MCU has a new low point on the Tomatometer, meaning future MCU movies will exist in a new context, where any comparisons made to the MCU's worst movie now mean comparing to a Rotten movie instead of a Fresh one. The actual sentiment of the MCU may not even change drastically, but thanks to the way Rotten Tomatoes is scored, some reviewers may mark their more mixed reviews as Rotten, resulting in a drop in the MCU's average Tomatometer score, and potentially even more movies getting ranked as Rotten.

Rotten Tomatoes can be fickle because it's not a true average of all review scores and instead represents what percent of reviews are rated positively, regardless of the actual individual review scores. That means generally anything rated under 2.5 of 5 stars is reduced to a simple "Rotten" review and everything over 2.5 of 5 stars is a "Fresh" review, although both 2.5 star and 3-star reviews can be designated as either Fresh or Rotten when critics submit them.

As a result, many movies in the 60% to 70% range could easily swing into Rotten territory depending on what direction reviewers lean when designating their 2.5-star or 3-star reviews. One of the more extreme examples of the impact on Rotten Tomatoes is a movie like Joker, which has a 7.3 average review score, better than half of the movies in the MCU, yet its Tomatometer score is 68%, which only ranks higher than four MCU movies.

The MCU's Future Less Fresh Movies Could Flip Rotten Thanks to Eternals

Eternals rotten tomatoes score compared to the rest of the MCU

The MCU's pattern of review success may have earned it a sort of benefit of the doubt. When Thor The Dark World was released, it was in the wake of the successful Phase 1, where the lowest scoring movie was The Incredible Hulk, which scored 67%, largely because it was seen as an improvement on Ang Lee's Hulk movie. So, since The Incredible Hulk was Fresh, any reviewers who thought Thor: The Dark World was better than The Incredible Hulk might be more likely to lean Fresh on their 2.5-star and 3-star reviews. Both of those movies would have fallen under the 60% threshold if 17 or 18 of their Fresh reviews flipped to Rotten, and they both easily have enough 2.5 and 3-star Fresh reviews in that range.

Related: Why Eternals Rotten Tomatoes Score is So Bad and How Low Will it Go?

It's not just movies teetering on the edge of that 60% range that are at risk, although their scores are naturally the most precarious, but some movies have a highly disproportionate score to their actual reviews, such as Ant-Man, which has an 83% Tomatometer score, but the average review score is 6.9 out of 10. That means there's likely a lot of reviews in that middle range scoring it low, but still good enough for a Fresh score. In that case, simply dropping all the middling reviews by a mere half star could make the difference between Fresh and positive, even though the movie is at 83%. It would take a lot for every future Marvel movie to suddenly start coming in Rotten, so that's not likely to happen, but the "good enough" Fresh scores of those more average or mediocre MCU movies make them precarious enough to be at risk.

Despite Eternals' low score, few reviewers actually think it's the MCU's worst film, posing a tough context for anyone who might review future MCU movies in context to the franchise's other films. If all the films are Fresh, then there's a pretty low bar to clear for a Fresh review, but now with Eternals in the mix, some reviewers may see the franchise differently when it comes to scoring future movies.

The MCU clearly has a formula figured out, and the 25 Fresh film streak is proof that they've effectively tapped into critics and the general audience, so the franchise will surely be mostly unimpacted by this shift, as shown by Eternals' solid opening weekend box office. The Marvel Cinematic Universe will move forward as it always had, it just might do so with a lower Rotten Tomatoes average.

Next: Eternals' Rotten Tomatoes Score Was An Inevitability For The MCU