Part of the issue, as I see it, of critics vs viewer ratings is that critics are paid to watch movies while viewers need to have high enough feelings, good or bad, about a movie to go through the...
Part of the issue, as I see it, of critics vs viewer ratings is that critics are paid to watch movies while viewers need to have high enough feelings, good or bad, about a movie to go through the process of actually rating them. So you almost exclusively just get viewer ratings of the people that are invested in sharing their opinion of the movie.
The people that tend to do this are either big fans of a movie/franchise/actor or utterly despise it. Go look at the reviews for just about anything, they're very rarely middle of the pack, it's either five stars or one. Then you've got the whole social media scandal cycle of review bombing anyone and anything that gets their little pitchforks rattling. Add in groups of fans that have, typically unwilling to admit, a choice-supportive bias for various media franchises and therefore highly defend their chosen fandom regardless of what garbage it spits out. So you get fandoms that push reviews high because they're invested in it or bombers who push them low because something/someone pissed them off.
There's also the critics that have been in the game too long. I'm not a critic, but even I can see many tropes and plots coming a mile off, imagine if you did that for a living... The only things that would tickle your ratings would be things you didn't see coming or were actually well done. A lot of critics can't seem to turn off and just enjoy a "fun movie". It doesn't have to be new, it doesn't have to be cutting edge, ask difficult questions, make some BS artsy filming decision, or anything else to be an enjoyable movie. So critics rate low, viewers rate high, the reality is somewhere in the middle.
Just about every movie they're referencing in this article I can chalk up to one of the points above. It's either a "fun" movie that critics hated or a franchise that fans love regardless of it being dribble. My opinion about many of them, as someone with near zero fandoms (and none that are in the movie sphere), runs the gamut of critics' lows to fans' highs.
I largely agree with you, but there are some outliers that don't fit your theory (one of which is even mentioned in this article) which I think bear mentioning. E.g. The Last Jedi was praised by...
I largely agree with you, but there are some outliers that don't fit your theory (one of which is even mentioned in this article) which I think bear mentioning. E.g. The Last Jedi was praised by critics and disliked by most fans despite being part of a generally beloved franchise, and yet not really being groundbreaking in any way either. And I am honestly still unsure of why critics seemed to love it so much, because it was a confusing, muddled, mess of a movie even from a purely filmmaking and screenwriting perspective, IMO. And I say that as someone who is a Rian Johnson fan too. I think he's a great writer and director, but he really screwed the pooch on TLJ.
...plus... ...and you get an answer in the article... Like it or not (or be willing to admit it or not), seemingly every fandom is full of racists, sexists, and bigots. And they tend to be the...
outliers that don't fit your theory
...plus...
anything that gets their little pitchforks rattling.
...and you get an answer in the article...
“Black Panther” and “Captain Marvel,” two of the most successful Marvel movies of the last five years, also got killed by fans online. There were reports of organized campaigns to bring down the audience scores for both titles. “Black Panther” was the first Marvel movie led by a black superhero. “Captain Marvel” was the first with a sole female protagonist. “The Last Jedi” was the rare “Star Wars” movie with a female protagonist. Read into that what you will.
Like it or not (or be willing to admit it or not), seemingly every fandom is full of racists, sexists, and bigots. And they tend to be the sort that are vocal about it/the sort that go out of their way to post reviews.
And the fact that by definition outliers don't always fit theories. If they did, they wouldn't be outliers.
I found Last Jedi to be visually appealing, but the Leia lives while Holdo dies (and a missed opportunity to pass the torch of a strong female character to a new generation, especially considering Fisher later died with enough time for reshoots to fix it) and Kylo being nothing more than a moody little brat with superpowers to be lazy writing. Visually appealing and a departure from the normal storyline tends to mean critics love, fandoms hate.
I'm not going to deny there are misogynist assholes who review bomb anything with female leads these days, or racist shitheads that do similar for anything with minority leads (see: Ms Marvel for...
I'm not going to deny there are misogynist assholes who review bomb anything with female leads these days, or racist shitheads that do similar for anything with minority leads (see: Ms Marvel for a double-whammy), but if misogyny was the primary cause for the low fan review scores of TLJ then why was The Force Awakened so well received? It preceded it, had the exact same female lead character, and wasn't hated on nearly as much.
As for departures from the normal storyline, I can't speak for anyone else, but that is not what bothered me about TLJ, it was mostly the sloppy writing and storytelling. And those issues tend to bother most film critics too, but for some reason it didn't seem to with TLJ.
This is not an unreasonable expectation! I can't load this article for some reason but based on the headline I have to side with the critics here. Hollywood feels very stale in recent years.
or were actually well done
This is not an unreasonable expectation!
I can't load this article for some reason but based on the headline I have to side with the critics here. Hollywood feels very stale in recent years.
This is a very poor quality article. It had me so upset I had to rewrite this comment three times so it wasn't an angry rant. When a critic watches a movie, they are looking at the technical...
This is a very poor quality article. It had me so upset I had to rewrite this comment three times so it wasn't an angry rant.
When a critic watches a movie, they are looking at the technical aspects of how the movie is made. They are looking for how well it tells it's story, and how good the performances are from the actors and actresses. They are trying to see if the film has novel techniques or technologies being employed, and they are always looking for that existentialist "deep inner meaning". While there are certainly some moviegoers who will be looking for those things as well, some of them have much simpler requirements like "did the movie ever get boring for me?", "Did it make me laugh?" and "Was there enough Ryan Gosling?" People increasingly don't go into movies because of their cinematic excellence. I haven't met a single person who said that Suicide Squad was a good movie, and yet it was the biggest movie of the year when it came out. Critics have long talked about the phenominon that is Michael Bay; his career is full of movies that critics all say are bad, but they perform really well in theaters because they're essentially rollercoasters (and with viewing experiences like 4DX, they're almost literally rollercoasters now). In the author's own list of blockbusters with the lowest critic scores, at least four of them are Bay productions and the rest are very clearly in his style.
One of the biggest problems I have with it is that he doesn't actually bother to talk to any critics to attempt to explain these differences in opinion. He just offers up his completely unsubstantiated theories instead. That's fundamentally bad journalism.
Sadly, this is not the only problem with the article; he's also misrepresenting the data. His source is Rotten Tomatoes; the Tomatometer is not a measure of what critics generally think about a movie, It's a percentage of published reviews that generally recommend people to see the film; in contrast the audience score is an actual averaging of individual ratings. And once again, there are many different reasons why a reviewer might recommend for or against seeing any particular movie. A more academic-minded reviewer is going to categorically recommend more challenging films than they would blockbuster popcorn flicks, but there are also reviewers who are more into pop culture who will recommend things for the same kinds of reasons as your average moviegoer might. In any case, because the methodology is different, you can't directly compare those numbers.
Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg has a very poor methodology. He is averaging the Tomatometer & Metacritic score. Tomatometer is a percent of all critics who liked the movie. Metacritic is the average...
Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg has a very poor methodology.
He is averaging the Tomatometer & Metacritic score. Tomatometer is a percent of all critics who liked the movie. Metacritic is the average score of the top critics. You just can't average those two things and get anything like a sensible result. I think @Akir touched on this.
If you click on the Tomatometer, you will actually see the average score of Rottentomatoes for Jurasic World Dominion and it is 4.80 out of 10 instead of 29% fresh. Average 4.8 with 3.8 from Metascore and you end up with 4.3, which is a lot closer to 5.7 from IMDB.
Secondly, while we have all the reviews from critics, we don't have all the IMDB scores yet. From what I have seen, IMDB scores typically go down over time. @AugustusFerdinand touched on this.
If you click into Batman Begins IMDB score, you will see that 912 top 1000 voters have voted for Batman Begins. Only 269 of top 1000 voters have voted for Jurasic World Dominion. Over time a different audience will slowly watch the movie. My theory is that those who see a movie early are more excited to see it, so the early IMDB ratings are higher. As it becomes easier to see the movie, more people see it, and the rating drops.
Thirdly, It could just be that we are going through a weird COVID thing right now. Maybe the movies are just critical bombs but good enough for the popcorn crowd. Maybe grumpy old farts such as myself aren't going to the theatre anymore so you only get the young kids rating on IMDB.
Edit: My second point is way off base. Batman begins & Mr/Mrs Smith only lost 0.1 point. End of Aug Batman Begins had 8.3/10 (52,007 votes). Now it has 8.2/10 (1.2M votes).
I think tastes for media in general have changed during covid, at least for me and a good number of people in my circle. Pre-covid I hated what I would call feel good, filler media (i.e. most...
Thirdly, It could just be that we are going through a weird COVID thing right now. Maybe the movies are just critical bombs but good enough for the popcorn crowd. Maybe grumpy old farts such as myself aren't going to the theatre anymore so you only get the young kids rating on IMDB.
I think tastes for media in general have changed during covid, at least for me and a good number of people in my circle. Pre-covid I hated what I would call feel good, filler media (i.e. most rom-coms, happy reality shows like the great british bake off, over the top blockbusters, etc...). Those types of films/shows aren't challenging at all and are generally pretty boring. Pre-covid I would have said Michael Bay could jump off a cliff. But in a covid world, I find myself consuming much more of that type of content. Most days there are enough difficult things on my mind that all I want to do is lay in bed and let Prue and Paul melt my brain with pastel colors, happy music, and congenial conversation. I want bubble gum movies. Hell, I was so ready to hate the Uncharted movie having been a huge fan of the game series and practically allergic to Marky Mark. And yet, it was so easy to watch. Marky Mark was... fine? I guess my overall expectations/needs from movies have shifted and from the article it seems I'm not alone.
I have a theory: We're more desperate to be enterained after two-ish years of no/minimal theaters, and the experience can make the movie. Lump that with Marvel fatigue and other phenomena, even...
I have a theory: We're more desperate to be enterained after two-ish years of no/minimal theaters, and the experience can make the movie.
Lump that with Marvel fatigue and other phenomena, even formally less good movies, and you've got the disparity.
Part of the issue, as I see it, of critics vs viewer ratings is that critics are paid to watch movies while viewers need to have high enough feelings, good or bad, about a movie to go through the process of actually rating them. So you almost exclusively just get viewer ratings of the people that are invested in sharing their opinion of the movie.
The people that tend to do this are either big fans of a movie/franchise/actor or utterly despise it. Go look at the reviews for just about anything, they're very rarely middle of the pack, it's either five stars or one. Then you've got the whole social media scandal cycle of review bombing anyone and anything that gets their little pitchforks rattling. Add in groups of fans that have, typically unwilling to admit, a choice-supportive bias for various media franchises and therefore highly defend their chosen fandom regardless of what garbage it spits out. So you get fandoms that push reviews high because they're invested in it or bombers who push them low because something/someone pissed them off.
There's also the critics that have been in the game too long. I'm not a critic, but even I can see many tropes and plots coming a mile off, imagine if you did that for a living... The only things that would tickle your ratings would be things you didn't see coming or were actually well done. A lot of critics can't seem to turn off and just enjoy a "fun movie". It doesn't have to be new, it doesn't have to be cutting edge, ask difficult questions, make some BS artsy filming decision, or anything else to be an enjoyable movie. So critics rate low, viewers rate high, the reality is somewhere in the middle.
Just about every movie they're referencing in this article I can chalk up to one of the points above. It's either a "fun" movie that critics hated or a franchise that fans love regardless of it being dribble. My opinion about many of them, as someone with near zero fandoms (and none that are in the movie sphere), runs the gamut of critics' lows to fans' highs.
I largely agree with you, but there are some outliers that don't fit your theory (one of which is even mentioned in this article) which I think bear mentioning. E.g. The Last Jedi was praised by critics and disliked by most fans despite being part of a generally beloved franchise, and yet not really being groundbreaking in any way either. And I am honestly still unsure of why critics seemed to love it so much, because it was a confusing, muddled, mess of a movie even from a purely filmmaking and screenwriting perspective, IMO. And I say that as someone who is a Rian Johnson fan too. I think he's a great writer and director, but he really screwed the pooch on TLJ.
...plus...
...and you get an answer in the article...
Like it or not (or be willing to admit it or not), seemingly every fandom is full of racists, sexists, and bigots. And they tend to be the sort that are vocal about it/the sort that go out of their way to post reviews.
And the fact that by definition outliers don't always fit theories. If they did, they wouldn't be outliers.
I found Last Jedi to be visually appealing, but the Leia lives while Holdo dies (and a missed opportunity to pass the torch of a strong female character to a new generation, especially considering Fisher later died with enough time for reshoots to fix it) and Kylo being nothing more than a moody little brat with superpowers to be lazy writing. Visually appealing and a departure from the normal storyline tends to mean critics love, fandoms hate.
I'm not going to deny there are misogynist assholes who review bomb anything with female leads these days, or racist shitheads that do similar for anything with minority leads (see: Ms Marvel for a double-whammy), but if misogyny was the primary cause for the low fan review scores of TLJ then why was The Force Awakened so well received? It preceded it, had the exact same female lead character, and wasn't hated on nearly as much.
As for departures from the normal storyline, I can't speak for anyone else, but that is not what bothered me about TLJ, it was mostly the sloppy writing and storytelling. And those issues tend to bother most film critics too, but for some reason it didn't seem to with TLJ.
Ask the author.
This is not an unreasonable expectation!
I can't load this article for some reason but based on the headline I have to side with the critics here. Hollywood feels very stale in recent years.
That's unfortunately not surprising since Bloomberg is an inconsistently paywalled mess. Here's a mirror for you: https://archive.ph/KXD73
This is a very poor quality article. It had me so upset I had to rewrite this comment three times so it wasn't an angry rant.
When a critic watches a movie, they are looking at the technical aspects of how the movie is made. They are looking for how well it tells it's story, and how good the performances are from the actors and actresses. They are trying to see if the film has novel techniques or technologies being employed, and they are always looking for that existentialist "deep inner meaning". While there are certainly some moviegoers who will be looking for those things as well, some of them have much simpler requirements like "did the movie ever get boring for me?", "Did it make me laugh?" and "Was there enough Ryan Gosling?" People increasingly don't go into movies because of their cinematic excellence. I haven't met a single person who said that Suicide Squad was a good movie, and yet it was the biggest movie of the year when it came out. Critics have long talked about the phenominon that is Michael Bay; his career is full of movies that critics all say are bad, but they perform really well in theaters because they're essentially rollercoasters (and with viewing experiences like 4DX, they're almost literally rollercoasters now). In the author's own list of blockbusters with the lowest critic scores, at least four of them are Bay productions and the rest are very clearly in his style.
One of the biggest problems I have with it is that he doesn't actually bother to talk to any critics to attempt to explain these differences in opinion. He just offers up his completely unsubstantiated theories instead. That's fundamentally bad journalism.
Sadly, this is not the only problem with the article; he's also misrepresenting the data. His source is Rotten Tomatoes; the Tomatometer is not a measure of what critics generally think about a movie, It's a percentage of published reviews that generally recommend people to see the film; in contrast the audience score is an actual averaging of individual ratings. And once again, there are many different reasons why a reviewer might recommend for or against seeing any particular movie. A more academic-minded reviewer is going to categorically recommend more challenging films than they would blockbuster popcorn flicks, but there are also reviewers who are more into pop culture who will recommend things for the same kinds of reasons as your average moviegoer might. In any case, because the methodology is different, you can't directly compare those numbers.
Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg has a very poor methodology.
He is averaging the Tomatometer & Metacritic score. Tomatometer is a percent of all critics who liked the movie. Metacritic is the average score of the top critics. You just can't average those two things and get anything like a sensible result. I think @Akir touched on this.
If you click on the Tomatometer, you will actually see the average score of Rottentomatoes for Jurasic World Dominion and it is 4.80 out of 10 instead of 29% fresh. Average 4.8 with 3.8 from Metascore and you end up with 4.3, which is a lot closer to 5.7 from IMDB.
Secondly, while we have all the reviews from critics, we don't have all the IMDB scores yet. From what I have seen, IMDB scores typically go down over time. @AugustusFerdinand touched on this.If you click into Batman Begins IMDB score, you will see that 912 top 1000 voters have voted for Batman Begins. Only 269 of top 1000 voters have voted for Jurasic World Dominion. Over time a different audience will slowly watch the movie. My theory is that those who see a movie early are more excited to see it, so the early IMDB ratings are higher. As it becomes easier to see the movie, more people see it, and the rating drops.Thirdly, It could just be that we are going through a weird COVID thing right now. Maybe the movies are just critical bombs but good enough for the popcorn crowd. Maybe grumpy old farts such as myself aren't going to the theatre anymore so you only get the young kids rating on IMDB.
Edit: My second point is way off base. Batman begins & Mr/Mrs Smith only lost 0.1 point. End of Aug Batman Begins had 8.3/10 (52,007 votes). Now it has 8.2/10 (1.2M votes).
I think tastes for media in general have changed during covid, at least for me and a good number of people in my circle. Pre-covid I hated what I would call feel good, filler media (i.e. most rom-coms, happy reality shows like the great british bake off, over the top blockbusters, etc...). Those types of films/shows aren't challenging at all and are generally pretty boring. Pre-covid I would have said Michael Bay could jump off a cliff. But in a covid world, I find myself consuming much more of that type of content. Most days there are enough difficult things on my mind that all I want to do is lay in bed and let Prue and Paul melt my brain with pastel colors, happy music, and congenial conversation. I want bubble gum movies. Hell, I was so ready to hate the Uncharted movie having been a huge fan of the game series and practically allergic to Marky Mark. And yet, it was so easy to watch. Marky Mark was... fine? I guess my overall expectations/needs from movies have shifted and from the article it seems I'm not alone.
I have a theory: We're more desperate to be enterained after two-ish years of no/minimal theaters, and the experience can make the movie.
Lump that with Marvel fatigue and other phenomena, even formally less good movies, and you've got the disparity.