Rotten Tomatoes was launched as a spare time project by Senh Duong. The site is devoted to reviews, information, and news of films. It's widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing rotten tomatoes or vegetables when disapproving a poor stage performance.
As a fan of Jackie Chan, Duong was inspired to create the website after collecting all the reviews of Chan's movies as they were being published in the U.S.. The first movie whose reviews were featured on Rotten Tomatoes was Your Friends & Neighbors. The website was an immediate success within the first week of its launch and attracted 600–1000 daily unique visitorst.
Since January 2010, the site has been owned by Flixster, and then acquired in 2011 as a Warner Bros. company.