Kalshi's Coyote vs. Acme Rotten Tomatoes market settled Monday morning, August 31, with the Tomatometer reading 96. Above 95 paid $1, Above 96 and Above 97 expired worthless, and every lower strike paid what its 99-cent price had long promised. The score underneath was a raw 95.50, on 191 positive reviews against 9 negative, and Rotten Tomatoes rounds the half-point up. The board held by zero reviews to spare.
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The Quick Answer
The final day came down to one question: would a single negative review post before the 10:00 AM ET snapshot and pin the display at 95? None did. Above 95, quoted at 69 bid against 76 ask on Sunday night, was 93 bid by breakfast Monday and printed its last trade at 99 cents. Holders beat Sunday's sellers by about a third of the contract. The exchange finalized all 16 strikes at 11:40 AM ET Monday, and nothing on the board can move again. Re-checked Thursday, September 3: the Rotten Tomatoes page has drifted to 96% on 236 reviews, which changes nothing about the settlement.
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What Each Strike Paid
Each contract asked one question, in Kalshi's own words: "If Coyote vs. Acme has a Tomatometer score of above 95 on Aug 31, 2026 at 10:00 AM ET, then the market resolves to Yes." The displayed score at the timestamp was the whole input. The table is the top of the ladder: the Sunday 8:03 PM ET quote this page published on settlement eve, next to the finalized result, with lifetime volume and open interest at the close as re-pulled from Kalshi on September 3.
| Strike | Sunday 8:03 PM ET Quote | Result | Payout | Volume (final) | Open Interest (at close) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Above 92 | 99¢ / 100¢ | Yes | $1.00 | 34,556 | 16,511 |
| Above 93 | 99¢ / 100¢ | Yes | $1.00 | 21,189 | 10,625 |
| Above 94 | 99¢ / 100¢ | Yes | $1.00 | 53,055 | 25,151 |
| Above 95 | 69¢ / 76¢ | Yes | $1.00 | 168,334 | 63,751 |
| Above 96 | 0¢ / 1¢ | No | $0.00 | 285,017 | 256,743 |
| Above 97 | 0¢ / 1¢ | No | $0.00 | 85,739 | 47,262 |
The ten strikes below Above 92, from Above 45 through Above 90, all finalized Yes as well. Above 95 was the only contract that carried real uncertainty into the final night, and its resolution to Yes is the one cell in the table the market earned its fees on. The snapshot-and-tie design is written up in how Kalshi settlement works, and this board now sits alongside the Kalshi Rotten Tomatoes markets explainer as a fully settled case study for the family.
Why The Margin Was Zero
Thursday's opening edition read two public numbers, 95% on 137 reviews, and inferred a split of 130 positive against 7 negative, flagging it as "a working assumption rather than a certified count." Every later checkpoint sat on that base, and the final 191 against 9 is that pool plus the weekend's reviews. The assumption inside the assumption was that Rotten Tomatoes rounds rather than truncates. Nobody publishes that convention, and the film landed on the exact half-point that tests it. A raw 95.50 displayed as 96 and finalized as 96. Had the site truncated, the same pool would have printed 95, and a contract quoted at 93 cents that morning would have gone to zero at the timestamp.
How The Final Night Traded
Sunday night's edition said the whole final day reduced to one sentence: no negative review posts before the snapshot. The price history spent the night pricing that absence. Above 95 entered the evening at 69 to 76 cents, stumbled once on a thin book in the 9 PM hour with a 24-point swing, and then walked toward a dollar at the speed of the clock. The last read this page took before the snapshot was 93 bid against 94 ask at 8:46 AM ET. The price history kept going without us: the strike's final hour carried two-thirds of everything it traded after Sunday's pull, and the last fill before the close cleared at 99 cents. No news arrived, and the price did what a price does when the event it fears fails to happen.
Above 96 told the other story. Its bid had been zeroed out for days, yet it finished as the busiest strike on the board by both volume and open interest. Across its life it traded 237,582 contracts at exactly one cent, and more than half of that buying came after Sunday's pull, when the arithmetic on this page had already put a 97 print out of reach. Some 256,743 contracts were still open when it finalized at zero. The board's biggest crowd stood on its deadest number.
How This Page's Own Arithmetic Graded
This URL made claims in public for four days. A market that settles on a counted number grades every one of them, so here is each against the print.
- The 130-against-7 split inference: confirmed, and load-bearing. The final pool sat exactly on Thursday's base, and the rounding hedge inside it decided which side of $1 the biggest open-interest strike landed on.
- The one-negative kill condition: right mechanism, never triggered. At Thursday's totals a lone negative printed 94; by Sunday the growing pool had moved the same exposure up a rung to Above 95. The market priced that lone negative at roughly one-in-four to one-in-three all Sunday night. The reviewers never supplied it.
- The 13-to-19-straight bar for 96: the bar was 19, and the film cleared it without a streak. Rounding was the convention, so the harder number applied. The film never produced a clean run; it added 61 positives against 2 negatives across its final 63 reviews and outgrew its misses. Pools this size move by composition.
- Sunday's overnight model: the small-pool branch was the real one. The eve edition put the hold at 91% if three reviews arrived and 72% at ten, and noted the market's 69-to-76 was pricing eight to a dozen. The pool came in at zero or one. The page's own model argued harder for Yes than its prose did, and the morning tape agreed.
Sell Or Hold: What The Ledger Said
Sunday night's edition laid out both paths without picking one. Take a single contract: selling into the 69-cent bid netted roughly 67 cents after Kalshi's fee of about two cents, while holding to settlement paid $1 with no further fee. The hold beat the sale by about 33 cents on the dollar. The rule underneath is simple: with a two-cent exit and a free hold, holding was the better side whenever your own probability of a 96 print cleared roughly 67%, and this page's overnight model had it at 85% to 91%. The quoted market was already on that side of the line before the outcome made it the far better side. Sunday's bid was also resting size of under a contract, so real size sold worse than the quote.
What Moved Since August 31
The market cannot move; every strike has been final since 11:40 AM ET Monday. The input kept going. As of the September 3 re-check the Rotten Tomatoes page reads 96% Certified Fresh on 236 reviews, 226 positive against 10 negative, a raw 95.76. One more negative than the 9 that settled the market has arrived, absorbed by 35 positives. The Verified Audience score sits at 95% on more than 1,000 ratings. Thirty-five reviews in three days is close to the weekend's clip, so the right read of Sunday night's lull was that reviewers sleep for 14 hours, and the question for the next board in this family is how many reviewers are still awake in its last night. The Associated Press put the opening weekend at an estimated $15.5 million domestic with an A CinemaScore, and Cartoon Brew's Comscore read added $8.4 million overseas for fifth on the global chart. None of it can reach a board finalized before lunch on Monday.
The Read
The asymmetry this page followed up the ladder all week, a favorite that could only fail to lose, held for its final 14 hours because the one review that could have broken it never posted. The only miss worth logging against this page is that its overnight model was more bullish than its prose. Warner Bros. Discovery priced this film as a write-off three years ago; a snapshot of a rounded percentage priced it one last time Monday morning. The lesson that survives settlement: on a Rotten Tomatoes ladder, the visible percentage is not the bet until you know the count underneath it and which way the half-point rounds.
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