The Evil Dead movies have a history of positive reviews, so how does Evil Dead Rise‘s Rotten Tomatoes score compare to the rest of the franchise? As the movie and franchise that launched Sam Raimi’s career as a popular horror director, and eventual popular superhero director thanks to the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy, The Evil Dead holds an important place in film history. Through five installments (and a series), The Evil Dead maintained a positive critical reception, unlike other popular horror franchises like Halloween.
So far Evil Dead Rise is getting really strong reviews, continuing a trend of Fresh Rotten Tomatoes scores for the Evil Dead franchise. While Bruce Campbell starred as Ash Williams in the first Evil Dead trilogy, all three of which are directed by Raimi, he only had a cameo in the fourth movie and has teased an Evil Dead Rise cameo, although Campbell and Rami remain as producers on both Evil Dead and Evil Dead Rise. Regardless, with early reviews for Evil Dead Rise giving it a strong Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score, how does it compare against the other Evil Dead movies?
Evil Dead Rise Has The Highest Rotten Tomatoes Score in the Evil Dead Franchise
Evil Dead Rise currently sports a 96 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, the best score of the entire Evil Dead franchise. The original The Evil Dead (1981) has an 85 percent, Evil Dead II (1987) has an 88 percent, Army of Darkness (1992) has a 69 percent, and Evil Dead (2013) has a 63 percent. The franchise has a perfect record of Fresh Rotten Tomatoes scores, but Evil Dead Rise‘s 96 percent is 16 points higher than the 80 percent average and 8 percent higher than The Evil Dead at 88 percent; however, even that doesn’t necessarily mean Evil Dead Rise is actually the best-reviewed Evil Dead movie.
Evil Dead Rise Doesn’t Have the Best Evil Dead Reviews, Despite High Rotten Tomatoes Scores
Despite having the highest Rotten Tomatoes score in the Evil Dead franchise, Evil Dead Rise only has the second-highest average review score in the franchise with a 7.6 average while The Evil Dead has a 7.7. The 96 percent Tomatometer score measures the percent of total reviews that are positive using a positive/negative binary, while the average review score measures the actual average scores of each review. So, even though Evil Dead Rise has a larger percentage of reviews marked “Fresh,” each individual review is slightly less enthusiastic than reviews for The Evil Dead.
Granted, the scores are incredibly close using either metric, and since The Evil Dead was released in 1981, long before the advent of Rotten Tomatoes, the retroactive scoring and other industry changes make it hard to treat the scores as an apples-to-apples comparison. Rotten Tomatoes should never be taken as an absolute indicator of quality, even if the review data can provide interesting insight to contrast critical opinions towards movies over time. Regardless of exactly how Evil Dead Rise gets ranked against the rest of the Evil Dead movies, the continued critical enthusiasm towards the franchise should be a good sign for fans of the Evil Dead films.
