The Tomato giveth, and the Tomato taketh away. And lo, the gospel of RottenTomatoes.com has Hollywood popping Klonopin and yanking out its hair more than ever as summer movie season gets going.

Take the cautionary tale of Baywatch and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, two films predicted by pre-release tracking to do boffo box office over Memorial Day weekend.

But after their dismal “freshness” ratings hit Rotten Tomatoes’ all-powerful Tomatometer—which assigns a numerical score to a given film based on a round-up of critical reviews—the Rock-starring lifeguard comedy promptly flopped, and the fifth installment of Disney’s long-running Johnny Depp franchise hauled in a “soft” $46 million—the lowest opening for a Pirates movie in 14 years.

“Insiders close to both films blame Rotten Tomatoes, with Pirates 5 and Baywatch respectively earning 32 percent and 19 percent Rotten,” Deadline reported. “The critic aggregation site increasingly is slowing down the potential business of popcorn movies.”

On the flip side, when it came to Warner Bros.’ Wonder Woman, the film’s “Certified Fresh” designation became an all-but-inescapable talking point—its 93 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating became an actual headline. And that helped the superheroine thriller shatter the glass ceiling of tracking expectations of a $65 million debut, magically lassoing $103.1 million over its opening days in theaters.

Video: A Brief History of Wonder Woman

Launched on a lark in 1998 by Web designer Senh Duong to catalogue reviews for Jackie Chan kung-fu flicks, Rotten Tomatoes has come to dominate the cultural conversation surrounding new movies and fundamentally change the calculus of putting butts in seats. It’s particularly, terrifyingly powerful among teens and 20-somethings who, as recently as five years ago, relied more often than not on “Bro, you gotta see this”-style word of mouth than any sort of professional critic appraisals to make their multiplex picks.

“Moviegoers love trailers. They pay attention to the TV spots. But Rotten Tomatoes is like the truth serum on the entire [promotional] campaign: are all the things you’re telling me about the movie true or not?” says Jon Penn, chief executive of the movie research firm National Research Group (NRG), which has tracked Rotten Tomatoes’ influence on audience behavior since 2010. “These scores are almost like a lubricant one way or the other. If it’s good, it helps you more than it did in the past. But if it’s bad, it hurts you even more.”

The next victim looks to be Tom Cruise’s $125 million action-horror romp The Mummy, which faces an abysmal 20 percent freshness rating and is anticipated to gross between $35 million and $40 million over its opening weekend, thereby entombing The Mummy’s franchise potential.

There are, to be sure, plenty of movies that become runaway hits despite craptacular Rotten Tomatoes scores—the Twilight and Transformers franchises, Tyler Perry’s Madea series, and the latest two entries in the nascent DC Extended Universe (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad) before Wonder Woman. But the larger pattern shows that the correlation between Rotten Tomatoes scores and audience interest has become remarkably consistent.

According to the stats compiled by NRG, almost every major moviegoing demographic reports an increasing reliance on Rotten Tomatoes. “One of the things we track is, ‘How often do you check Rotten Tomatoes scores before you decide to see a film?’” Penn says. “In 2014, 28 percent of all moviegoers said they were checking. In 2016, it’s 36 percent. Teens went from 23 [percent] to 34. That’s an enormous jump.”

And the studios are only preparing for it to get worse. An independent study commissioned by 20th Century Fox in 2015 (and obtained by Vanity Fair), titled “Rotten Tomatoes and Box Office,” concluded, “The power of Rotten Tomatoes and fast-breaking word of mouth will only get stronger. Many Millennials and even Gen Xers now vet every single purchase through the internet, whether it’s restaurants, video games, make-up, consumer electronics, or movies. As they get older and comprise an even larger share of total moviegoers, this behavior is unlikely to change.”

The power of the review aggregator has infuriated heavy hitters like Brett Ratner, who—in an apparent fit of pique after his recent producing effort Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice earned an eye-watering 27 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes—called it “the worst thing that we have in today’s movie culture.”

Video: Baywatch Star Alexandra Daddario Talks Zac Efron and Working with Dwayne Johnson

Despite having just gone through the Tomato grinder with Baywatch, Paramount’s president of worldwide distribution and marketing, Megan Colligan, took pains to point out that she is not anti-film criticism or even anti-Rotten Tomatoes, per se. Instead, the executive voiced frustration with the kind of feedback loop a negative RT score increasingly engenders. “It’s a hard thing to figure out how to proceed,” Colligan says. “It’s not word of mouth around the movies anymore. It’s word of mouth around the reviews.”

Inside the studio C-suite, general bedevilment toward the site has lately given way to more focused suspicions surrounding the group of critics whose opinions power the Tomatometer. “The issue is more than just this seismic shift,” says one executive. “When you take the 140 Rotten Tomatoes critics, you’re talking about a lot of men, a lot of white guys, a lot of people over 40. A 17-year-old girl is making a decision about what she wants to see based on that aggregate decision? I don’t think it actually mirrors their own taste.”

One possible solution: limiting or outright eliminating critics’ screenings in the lead-up to a film’s release. Once upon a time, this would have been the nuclear option—a sure harbinger to industry observers of the filmic turd to come. But now it’s seen as an at least somewhat effective measure to prevent bad word of mouth from spreading across social media on a Tomato-tinged tide.

That much is explicitly spelled out in Fox’s internal report: “Consider not giving the critics a chance to slam you,” reads a bullet point. “While it’s never a great feeling to withhold from critics, now it may help to at least preserve your Friday.”

The most obvious recourse to Hollywood’s Rotten Tomatoes conundrum, of course, may also be the simplest (at least on paper): prioritize filmmaking quality over marketing artifice, make better/more interesting/more appealing films, and stop blaming some stupid website for lackluster box-office returns.

“To me, it’s a ridiculous argument that Rotten Tomatoes is the problem,” says a marketing executive at an independent film distributor. “Fuck you—make a good movie!”