Pixar movies are nearly universally loved, so the fact that the studio has a phenomenal track record in Rotten Tomatoes, but how does it compare to other popular movie franchises? From the MCU's near-perfect track record to something more spotty like Star Wars, Harry Potter, or the DCEU, consistently scoring high Rotten Tomatoes scores is easier said than done.
Pixar's studio debut with Toy Story's 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes score could be prophetic for the franchise's track record of the next several decades. While it's not a totally spotless filmography, and 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes score is a hard bar to maintain across 25 Pixar movies and 27 years, the animation studio has still put up enough amazingly reviewed movies to be worthy of the envy of any other studio.
With the release of Turning Red to a 94 percent score, Pixar's tradition of excellent reviews and high Rotten Tomatoes scores continues. So, how has it changed over time, and how does it compare to other franchises?
Pixar Has an Almost Flawless Track Record in Rotten Tomatoes
With the release of Turning Red, Pixar has now produced 25 animated feature films, all but one of which have a Fresh score in Rotten Tomatoes. Altogether Pixar's Tomatometer average is 89 percent, with 18 movies scoring over 90 percent, two movies scoring over 80 percent, three movies scoring over 69 percent, and one with a 39 percent Rotten rating, Cars 2.
The Toy Story movies are the clear frontrunners, coming in with two perfect 100 percent Fresh scores (Toy Story and Toy Story 2), 98 percent (Toy Story 3), and 97 percent (Toy Story 4) for a 99 percent average. After that, the two Nemo movies have a 97 percent average with Finding Nemo scoring 99 percent and Finding Dory scoring 94 percent; the Incredibles movies average 95 percent with The Incredibles scoring 97 percent and The Incredibles 2 scoring 93 percent; the Monsters movies average 80 percent with Monsters Inc. scoring 96 percent and Monsters University scoring 80 percent; and the Cars movies average 61 percent with Cars at 74 percent, Cars 2 at 39 percent, and Cars 3 at 69 percent. The overall Rotten Tomatoes average for every Pixar series is 87 percent, while the average for all the one-off movies is 92 percent; however, the average for every Pixar series jumps considerably to 95 percent when the Cars movies are excluded.
How Pixar Compares to the MCU and Other Major Franchises in Rotten Tomatoes
Pixar's track record is impressive, but it's not the only studio to see such an impressive run of success, as Marvel Studios, which now has 26 movies in the MCU, has also seen every movie score a Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score aside from The Eternals. With more overall Fresh films, by one, the MCU's Fresh-to-Rotten ratio may be marginally better, but comparing average scores, Pixar comes out significantly better with an 89 percent average over the MCU's 84 percent. Pitting the two studios head-to-head, the MCU's highest-scoring movie is Black Panther with a 96 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, while Pixar has 11 movies that scored 96 percent or higher. Additionally, the MCU has 11 films with a score higher than 90 percent, while Pixar's 18 over-90 percent films account for more than half the studio's filmography.
The MCU and Pixar are both a bit of a gold standard when it comes to Rotten Tomatoes track records, untouched when it comes to an entire studio, but compared to other popular franchises, Harry Potter has a 79 percent average, Star Wars has a 78 percent average, James Bond has a 71 percent average, and the DCEU has a 63 percent average. Granted, Pixar's entire filmography is animated films largely targeted at children, which has a bit of an impact on how many critics may approach their reviews, while the way critics approach live-action films, older target audiences, different genres, and different time periods also have a major impact on reviews and Rotten Tomatoes scores, but that doesn't make the nearly perfect track records of Pixar or the MCU any less impressive.
How Pixar's Rotten Tomatoes Scores Changed Over Time
With Toy Story's 100 percent score marking Pixar's first outing, the studio's Rotten Tomatoes score can only go downhill from there, which it technically did, the studio's staying power is still more than impressive. The average score of the three Pixar films released in the 90s was 97 percent, the seven films released in the 2000s averaged slightly lower at 94 percent, the 11 films released in the 2010s dropped even more (thanks particularly to the three Cars films) to an average of 84 percent, and then in the average score for the four Pixar films released in the 2020s so far jumped back up to 92 percent.
While the drop from the 2000s to the 2010s is fairly significant (at least compared to other Pixar decades), it's impressive that the studio's worst decade is still on-par with the MCU's overall average. Whether that trend holds and the 2020s mark another Pixar decade with an over-90 percent Rotten Tomatoes average remains to be seen, but with Lightyear as the next film up, and Toy Story standing as Pixar's best-reviewed series, never scoring below a 97 percent, things are looking positive so far. Of course, even if it does drop, the strong track record established so far means it'd take a massive drop in quality for multiple movies to drop Pixar's overall average to even fall below the MCU Rotten Tomatoes average.
Of course, Rotten Tomatoes is ultimately a bit of a quirky way to quantify and measure something as abstract as a movie review, so it's far from an objective measurement of what movies any particular person will prefer. Even so, Pixar's ability to not only consistently produce films that are Fresh, but reviewed in the 90 percent range (hitting 100 percent multiple times), it's impossible to say that doesn't signal a consistently strong grasp of quality and creativity from everyone involved in the production teams at Pixar for the last 27 years.
