Which Star Wars Movies Rank Highest On Rotten Tomatoes?

Given that films are an art and there's no way to objectively determine the worth of a piece of art, attaching statistics to a film is far from a scientific process, as results can be passionately disputed. Despite this conundrum, movie review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes compiles a vast amount of data to determine how many critics consider a film positive, or "fresh," vs. negative, or "rotten."

The Star Wars saga is one of the most admired series of films in the history of cinema, yet, when looking at the percentage of positive scores on Rotten Tomatoes, not every film is as much of an accomplishment as the next, according to the aggregator site.

At the top of the list is The Empire Strikes Back, which has a score of 94% positive reviews. The film is often cited as the best of the bunch, as it plunges its characters to emotional depths not seen in the prior film.

Interestingly, the original Star Wars, The Force Awakens andThe Last Jedi are all currently tied at 93% positive. The Last Jedi's ranking has the potential to adjust in either direction by a few percentage points, as it initially debuted with 96% positive reviews and has dropped multiple percentage points as more reviews were tallied.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story sits at 85% positive, followed by Return of the Jedi with 80% while Revenge of the Sith sits at 79%. These mark the last films in the installment that meet the criteria of "Certified Fresh" on the site, which is earned when a film or TV series earns a score above 75% with more than 80 reviews tallied.

The worst reviews in the saga come from Attack of the Clones with 66% positive reviews and The Phantom Menace, which comes in last with 55% positive.

It's worth reiterating that these statistics are in no way objective, with The Last Jedi creating an interesting contradiction when incorporating the "fan score."

Critics consider the film to be as compelling a movie as the original film, with only The Empire Strikes Back earning a higher score, but with nearly 70,000 votes, the fan score is the lowest in the entire franchise at 56%. This score is tabulated by the number of users who rate the movie as 3.5 or higher out of a possible 5.

The rest of the films in the saga have fan scores that are within 15 percentage points of the critical score, making The Last Jedi's difference of nearly 40 points a massive outlier.

Over the coming weeks and as more fans see the movie, this score could go up, so only time will tell how this latest installment will be viewed by fans further down the line.

The Last Jedi is in theaters now.

[H/T Rotten Tomatoes]