A Rotten Tomatoes score mostly measures how a new version compares with the versions critics already remember. That is the useful way to take the news that Netflix's new Man on Fire, a seven-episode series and the third screen adaptation of a 1980 novel, is scoring well above the 2004 film Tony Scott directed with Denzel Washington. The headline casts it as a rematch between two leading men, with a percentage as the referee. The number is narrower than that. It records the share of critics who came away positive, the thrilled and the merely satisfied counted alike, and it says nothing about intensity or memory. A film can win that count and fade by summer. My hunch, and you are welcome to fight me on it, is that the 2004 version never needed to win this particular vote. Its claim was always Washington's face in close-up, and no aggregate has a column for that.
The score also carries some baggage. Every critic reviewing the Netflix series walks in with Tony Scott's film in mind, and some remember the 1987 one too. A thriller remake gets graded against its predecessors, because nobody reopens a 1980 paperback to check whether the tension was on the page first. The aggregate never asks the question that decides most adaptations: how much of the power was already written down before anyone cast a star? For a play, the answer can be almost everything. For a thriller it is often very little, which is why remakes rise and fall on direction and casting. The actor the headline treats as the measuring stick also directed and starred in the film of Fences, and that script is a clean place to test how far the words carry a performance.
Fences is set in 1950s Pittsburgh, just before the next decade's upheavals arrive. Troy Maxson, a former Negro League ballplayer, spends his days on a job that grants him nothing he once hoped for and his evenings in a small domestic world where he finally gets to set the rules. The trouble is that he brings the job home with him. His pride and resentment land on his wife and his son, and moments as ordinary as a Friday conversation in the yard turn into confrontations that feel like verdicts. On the page, the script shows you exactly where that pressure is coming from.
Wilson's dialogue is so exact that you can hear Troy's rhythm before any actor supplies it: the boasting that slides into grievance, the joke that ends up as a threat. That precision is the reason actors keep coming back to the material. A performer playing Troy can pick emphases and pauses, but the lines have already done most of the deciding. Read the text first and you see how little an actor has to invent, which makes it easier to spot the small things the good ones still find. The book's own description says the play holds up on the page as fully as it does in the theater, and I don't think that's quite true.
Troy talks so much, and so well, that in print the other characters can seem to be waiting for their turn. His wife's silences read as blank space. Onstage, or on screen, those silences belong to an actor, and they can hit harder than any speech. A script can say that she is quiet. It takes a performer to make that quiet mean something. If the film strikes you as stagey, that is Wilson's doing. The play runs on long, uninterrupted talk, and Washington kept that talk intact instead of chopping it into a more cinematic shape.
The choice is accurate, because the talking is how Troy dominates his household, and trimming it would make him gentler than he is. The play's deepest subject is inheritance. Troy's ambitions were thwarted by a world that would not count what he could do, and he answers by becoming the one who decides what counts at home. His son ends up living inside that grudge. The cost of a buried dream, in Wilson's hands, is handed down like a family debt, and there is a fence in the title for a reason.
The remake cycle in 2026 shows no sign of slowing, and each new version will arrive with its score posted beside the old one, as if the two had run the same race on the same track. They rarely have. Scores drift as critics turn over and tastes shift around them, and the Man on Fire number will look different once the next adaptation lands. Fences stays exactly as written. If you read the script before you watch any version of it, you will know what the production started with, and you will hold a measure no aggregate supplies. The page keeps the image it always held: a man in a Pittsburgh yard, talking his family into the shape of his disappointment.