Heirloom Chrome Extension Customizes Rotten Tomatoes to Your Movie Tastes

Movies are subjective. Your very favorite movie might be your best friend’s most hated film. Movie aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes take the reviews of hundreds of professional movie critics to calculate a percentage that, ostensibly, should tell you whether a movie is good or bad. But what happens when your personal tastes don’t mesh with popular opinion?

Enter Heirloom, a Google Chrome extension that gives you film critic scores customized specifically to your tastes. Once you install the extension and log in to Rotten Tomatoes, Heirloom allows you to rate a handful of new movies (or import your existing RT film ratings) and recalculates the Tomatometer, based on your likes and dislikes. The more movies you rate, the better Heirloom can work for you. It also gives you a filtered list of critics who might share your opinion on a particular movie, which could lead to some good recommendations for your must-watch list.

In the name of research, this author freely copped to liking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, even though the general consensus differs (the film currently holds a 37 percent “Rotten” rating). After installing Heirloom and rating a few movies, the Chrome extension gave the sequel movie a new “Fresh” rating of 96 percent, along with a few film critics who share that opinion, including Forbes’ Scott Mendelson and mental_floss contributor Eric D. Snider.

Heirloom is free and available in the Chrome Web Store.

[h/t Lifehacker]