User blog comment:Darkcloud1111/Official "The Sea of Monsters (movie)" Discussion/@comment-3146930-20130806041549/@comment-4531192-20130806232205

Wait a minute. People still use MSN? Anyway, Rotten Tomatoes is basically another Metacritic. They aggregate reviews and assign an average score for each release. As of right now, the Sea of Monsters movie has only like 20 reviews by what Rotten Tomatoes calls "top critics", meaning the rating can swing in pretty much any direction.

As to the first movie's rating, I don't find it surprising that it got an average score, as critics don't really care about how faithful the movie is to the book as much as they do about how good the movie is itself. Basically, the first movie is average as a standalone film, but fails to please most Percy Jackson fans.

What I'm afraid is going to happen to the second movie is that critics are going to paint it as some kind of a "Harry Potter-wannabe" (because let's be real, they haven't and won't read the books) and give it a bad rating by default.