Somebody finally built the website the rest of us have been keeping in our heads for a decade. A new Rotten Tomatoes alternative has gone viral this week for doing the one thing the big aggregators refuse to do: telling you upfront whether a movie is about to lecture you before it entertains you. The Tab has the rundown, and of course the internet is divided, which is the internet's way of admitting somebody touched a nerve.

The site scores films on their woke content, so you know walking in whether you're getting a movie or a seminar with a catering budget. That is the entire service, and the fact that it went viral tells you everything about the demand. People have been leaving theaters for years feeling like they paid $18 to be told they're the problem, and the critics' scores kept insisting they'd just watched a masterpiece. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes became the only honest number on the page, and even that started smelling like it was farmed.

Naturally, the usual crowd is scandalized. You can already write the responses without reading them: it's for bigots, it's unnecessary, real film lovers don't need a content warning for diversity. What they never answer is why the same people who brought you content warnings for everything under the sun suddenly develop a principled objection to audience information when the information runs the other direction. We were told for years that ratings and labels were consumer protection. Apparently that only counts when the label flatters the studio.

I've been doing this beat long enough to remember when we didn't need a website for this, because the movies were too busy being good to bother with the sermon. Nobody needed a wokeness score for The Sting. You bought your ticket, you got a caper, Robert Redford grinned, everybody went home happy. Somewhere along the way the people making the pictures decided the audience was a captive congregation, and the box office has been wandering in the desert ever since. When your flop list reads like a syllabus, the market is telling you something, and now a website is telling you too.

Will the site be perfect? Of course not. Any scoring system can get twitchy, and I'd rather a movie get dinged for being bad than for being opinionated, because I've loved plenty of opinionated pictures that respected me enough to be entertaining about it. The good ones always have been. The best defense against a lazy wokeness score is the same as the best defense against a lazy critics' score: judgment, applied by people who actually watch the movies.

But the sour grapes from the industry are the tell. If your product is good, an extra rating site is just more free advertising. The only people threatened by an informed audience are the ones who've been counting on an uninformed one. Ask the popcorn, it never lies.