Before Rotten Tomatoes Launched Senh Duong Coded for Jackie Chan
The web's most famous review aggregator began as a two-week hobby project by a web designer eager to see how America rated Rush Hour.
When I trace the beginnings of transformative digital platforms, the most enduring creations rarely start in corporate boardrooms. They are born from authentic personal curiosity and unbridled enthusiasm. Long before Rotten Tomatoes became a household name owned by multinational media giants, it was a handcrafted side project created by a 28-year-old web designer working late into the night in Northern California. He had no venture funding. He had no corporate backing. He simply wanted to read what film reviewers thought of his favorite action star.
That creator was Senh Duong, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, who had co-founded a boutique web design firm called Design Reactor with his college classmates Patrick Lee and Stephen Wang. In the summer of 1998, Duong shared a passionate devotion with millions of action cinema fans around the globe: he idolized Hong Kong martial arts legend Jackie Chan.
The Rush Hour Spark That Ignited an Idea
During the late 1990s, Jackie Chan was preparing for his major Hollywood crossover with the action-comedy film Rush Hour, co-starring Chris Tucker. Duong was intensely eager to see how mainstream American newspaper critics would receive his favorite martial artist. In those early days of the commercial web, finding movie reviews was an exhausting, fragmented scavenger hunt. Movie fans had to visit dozens of individual newspaper homepages, navigate clunky search directories, or buy physical print periodicals at local newsstands. It was tedious work.
Frustrated by the absence of a centralized hub, Duong decided to build one himself. Over a frantic two-week sprint in early August 1998, he coded the entire initial website by hand after completing his normal daily client work. He created custom pixel-art icons, organized simple HTML table structures, and wrote Perl scripts to manage incoming review links. He intended to launch the site on the very day Rush Hour arrived in theaters. When the film's studio pushed the release date from August to September, Duong chose not to wait. He published Rotten Tomatoes on August 12, 1998, featuring critical summaries of current titles such as Your Friends & Neighbors.
- Summer 1998: Senh Duong conceives a review hub to track American critical response to Jackie Chan's Hollywood breakthrough.
- August 12, 1998: Rotten Tomatoes goes live as a personal side project with handcrafted HTML and manual review links.
- Mid-August 1998: Netscape features the fledgling review aggregator on its popular web portal homepage.
- September 1998: Rush Hour opens to massive box-office success and strong critical reception, validating Duong's original vision.
- January 2000: Duong, Lee, and Wang formally incorporate Rotten Tomatoes as an independent commercial startup.
Where the Name Rotten Tomatoes Came From
The name itself carries a charming dual origin. While modern audiences immediately associate rotten tomatoes with 19th-century theater patrons throwing bruised vegetables at clumsy vaudeville performers, Duong drew specific cinematic inspiration from a poignant scene in the 1992 Canadian drama Léolo. In the film, a character dreams that his soul entered a crate of imported Italian tomatoes. That whimsical image sparked Duong's imagination.
I checked early internet archives from 1998 and discovered that the site captured lightning in a bottle almost immediately. Within days of its launch, Netscape showcased Rotten Tomatoes on its prestigious browser homepage, driving thousands of enthusiastic movie fans to the server. Traffic surged overnight. By January 2000, Duong and his partners transitioned the project from an evening hobby into a venture-backed company.
A Joyful Legacy of Fan Passion
We can see in Senh Duong's journey a wonderful reminder of what makes the internet special. He did not build Rotten Tomatoes to conquer Hollywood; he built it because he loved movies and wanted to share that excitement with fellow fans. That sincere passion transformed a modest coding experiment into an enduring cornerstone of modern cinema culture.
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