By Any Means is 47% on the Tomatometer and 88% with verified ticket buyers, a 41-point split between the critics and the people who paid for a seat. The film opened at 56% on 41 reviews on Friday, September 4, and every wave of reviews since has pulled it down: 51% on 63 reviews by Tuesday, 49% on 68 by Thursday, 47% on 72 as of Monday, September 14. The audience score has barely moved the whole time. That gap is the story of this release, and it is the reason a Kalshi board built on the critics' number alone paid out the way it did.
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The Scores As Of September 14
| Who | Score | Based on |
|---|---|---|
| Critics | 47% | Tomatometer, Rotten: 72 reviews, 34 positive against 38, average rating 5.5 of 10 |
| Top tier | 38% | Top Critics: 16 reviews, 6 positive against 10 |
| Fans | 88% | Popcornmeter, verified ticket buyers: 500+ ratings, 841 liked against 110 |
| All fans | 85% | Popcornmeter, all audience: 1,000+ ratings, 1,467 liked against 262 |
Pulled from the Rotten Tomatoes page at 8:03 PM ET on Monday, September 14, 2026.
A 5.5 average is not a savaging. It is a shrug: 38 critics who could not recommend the film and 34 who could, mostly by narrow margins. The Top Critics subset has been harsher than the general pool since opening weekend and still is, 6 positive of 16. The audience number runs the other way and runs deep, and it has been stable since the first weekend, which is what separates a film critics dislike from a film nobody wants to see.
The Paramount thriller stars Mark Wahlberg as the mob hitman Gregory Scarpa and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as the FBI agent Wayne Strider. It is Elegance Bratton's dramatization of the investigation into the 1966 killing of the Mississippi civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer. Rotten Tomatoes' own Labor Day box office column put the opening at $7.5 million for the three-day weekend and an estimated $9.3 million through Monday.
The Score Fell With Every Wave
Kalshi's September 1 newsroom preview forecast a 73.2% Tomatometer. Nothing that has posted since has come close. Here is where the count stood at each point a copy of the Rotten Tomatoes page was archived, plus this page's own pulls:
| When | Score | Reviews | Positive / negative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fri Sept 4, 4:24 PM ET | 56% | 41 | 23 / 18 |
| Fri Sept 4, 6:00 PM ET | 55% | 44 | 24 / 20 |
| Sat Sept 5, 1:03 AM ET | 52% | 48 | 25 / 23 |
| Sat Sept 5, 7:20 PM ET | 55% | 53 | 29 / 24 |
| Sun Sept 6, 2:50 PM ET | 55% | 53 | 29 / 24 |
| Tue Sept 8, 5:23 PM ET | 51% | 63 | 32 / 31 |
| Thu Sept 10, 1:06 AM ET | 49% | 68 | 33 / 35 |
| Mon Sept 14, 8:03 PM ET | 47% | 72 | 34 / 38 |
The shape to notice is the flat stretch. From Saturday evening to Sunday afternoon the pool took no new reviews at all: 29 against 24 for more than 19 straight hours. Then the tail arrived cold. Of the 19 reviews filed after Sunday afternoon, 5 were positive and 14 were negative. A film that opened Fresh-adjacent at 56 was 47 ten days later, and the slide came almost entirely from critics filing a week late.
ScreenRant had the film at 53% in a Saturday afternoon box office piece and CBR at 55% on 53 reviews Sunday afternoon, both consistent with the archived counts above.
Kalshi's Board Settled At 51 To 55
Kalshi ran ten contracts on the score, ticker KXRT-BYA, each asking the same question one rung apart: "If By Any Means has a Tomatometer score of above 45 on Sep 7, 2026 at 10:00 AM ET, then the market resolves to Yes." The board closed on that 10:00 AM snapshot on Monday, September 7, and the exchange settled every strike the same morning.
| Strike | Friday Sept 4 quote (bid / ask) | Last trade | Result | Payout |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Above 45 | 97¢ / 98¢ | 99¢ | Yes | $1.00 |
| Above 50 | 69¢ / 71¢ | 99¢ | Yes | $1.00 |
| Above 55 | 25¢ / 44¢ | 1¢ | No | $0.00 |
| Above 60 | 6¢ / 10¢ | 1¢ | No | $0.00 |
| Above 65 | 2¢ / 5¢ | 1¢ | No | $0.00 |
| Above 70 | 0¢ / 1¢ | 1¢ | No | $0.00 |
Quotes as published on this page at 4:24 PM ET Friday, September 4. Above 75 through Above 90, not shown, never carried a bid and all resolved No. Results confirmed against Kalshi's market records for KXRT-BYA on September 14.
Kalshi publishes the result, not the number, so the settlement itself only brackets the snapshot: above 50, not above 55, means the Tomatometer read somewhere from 51 to 55 at 10:00 AM that Monday. The last count anyone archived before the snapshot was 55% on 53 reviews on Sunday afternoon. The first after it was 51% on 63 on Tuesday. The film has not been back above 51 since.
The 55 Strike Broke In 96 Minutes
The only live question on the board was Above 55, and it died on opening night. On Friday afternoon the film sat at 23 positive of 41, so a single negative review made 23 of 42, which is 54.76 and displays as 55 — below a strike that requires strictly above 55. Ninety-six minutes after this page's Friday pull, the archived Rotten Tomatoes page read 55% on 44 reviews. Three reviews had landed, one positive and two negative, and either negative on its own was enough.
The price history saw it before any archive did. Above 55 opened the 6:00 PM hour at 33 cents and traded 364 contracts between 16 and 33. At 7:00 PM, 219 contracts printed at 25. In the 8:00 PM hour 846 contracts changed hands between 21 and 24 cents and 834 of them were sold, the largest a 435-contract sell at 22 cents. By 9:00 PM the strike printed 7 to 10 cents. From a 44-cent ask to 6 cents in six hours, on a Rotten Tomatoes page that moved one point.
It came back once. The five reviews that arrived between Saturday's 1:03 AM low and Saturday evening ran four positive and one negative, pushed the score from 52 to 55, and carried Above 55 back to 28 to 32 cents by Saturday's close. From 29 positive of 53, one more positive review made 30 of 54 — a 55.56 that displays as 56 and pays. That was the entire bet all day Sunday: which review posts first. None posted. In the 11:00 PM Sunday hour, 1,898 contracts traded and 1,772 were sold, walking the strike from 26 cents to 9. Its last prints went through at 1 cent at 7:42 AM Monday, two and a half hours before the snapshot.
Above 50 never flinched. It had a five-review cushion on Friday, saw that cushion shrink to two by 1:03 AM Saturday — the market marked it at 23 cents on six contracts at 2:31 AM, its low of the weekend — and then rebuilt it on the same five reviews that rescued the 55. It traded 96 to 99 all Sunday night and printed its last two contracts at 99 cents at 9:58 AM Monday, two minutes before the close.
Why The Same 56 Held For Onslaught And Broke Here
Both films sat at 56 on Friday afternoon, September 4. Onslaught's Above 55 resolved Yes and this one resolved No, and the difference was not the film or the depth of the order book. It was the size of the review pool.
One review moves a 53-review pool by nearly two points. It moves a 107-review pool by less than one. Onslaught's 56 could absorb a negative notice and stay a 56; By Any Means' 56 could not absorb anything. That is the reusable lesson on any Rotten Tomatoes score market: the count underneath the percentage is the bet, not the percentage, and a wide-release film with 41 reviews on opening night is a fundamentally different instrument from one with 100.
The Read
Ten days on, the critics' verdict on By Any Means is a 47 that is still drifting down and an audience score of 88 that is not moving at all. If you are deciding whether to buy a ticket, that split is the useful number: the people who saw it liked it a great deal more than the people paid to watch it. If you traded the board, the useful number is 96 minutes, which is how long the 55 strike survived a piece saying one negative review would break it. A 19-cent spread on that strike looked like a bargain on Friday afternoon and was not, because nobody with size wanted to hold a contract the next post could zero. Had the board settled on today's page instead of Monday's, Above 50 would have gone to zero too. It settled on Monday's, which is the whole design. Nothing here is financial advice.
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