Recently there has been a lot of talk about professional movie critics, people are beginning to ask themselves “Are they really trustworthy?” Leaving people wondering if they should see a based on critic reviews or what the audience has to say. Some are even starting to think the entire system is flawed. Recently there have been movie releases that were loved by fans but not so much by the critics, for example, “Black Adam” had a Rotten Tomatoes score of only 38% while the audience score was 88%. The big gap here clearly shows something. Professional critics shouldn’t get all the credit and we should consider, changing the system.
Movie critics are the people seen as the “pros” in the movie reviewing system and audiences trust their opinion more than anyone else’s and can them away from a wrongly reviewed movie. A good recent and popular example is “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.” Right before the release, many saw the critic reviews roll in and they were horrible around 40-50% on rotten tomatoes, leading everyone to think the movie would be worse than their expectations. However upon release, the audience score skyrocketed, making about 1.22 billion dollars at the box office and the movie became the top animated movie within less than a week, topping some big hitters like “Frozen,” “Toy Story,” and “The Incredibles.” It received an audience tomato score of around 90% with everyone loving the movie despite those harsh critic reviews.
The main cause for this popularity is that it is the Mario movie people have been waiting decades for. Like it’s Mario! We all know it would do big in numbers no matter what the old critics said. But my point here is that if it was not Mario and not produced by a big company, those kinds of unfair critic reviews would really hurt the movie and dismiss the hard work put into the acting and funding. This is why I think audience reviews are very important, and even more important than critic reviews. Movies such as adaptations of a show, video game, comic book, etc, are mostly viewed by families and big fans of the series the movie adaptation is based on. However, critics might not be fans and review movies of series they know nothing about. These kinds of movies aren’t made for the professionals, it’s for the fans, children, and families to go into the theater and sit there and have fun and enjoy what they are watching.
To further this point the Mario movie had critic reviews that were random and untrue. For example, one critic said the movie was a “simple cash grab” trying to imply the movie wasn’t really there to please long-time fans of the franchise, making people think it was just going to be another flop movie with Chris Pratt slapped on it. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth, after audience and fan reviews came pouring in review after review mentioning every little easter egg and reference to the original franchise, showing how much effort, love, and care were truly put into the movie to please the fans. Now I don’t blame him for what he said, we have to understand this guy clearly didn’t understand what Mario was as a franchise. And this is my main point here: critics should be assigned movies that they either know a lot about. Or if they truly know nothing about it should write their reviews and clearly state that. Now some people might go against this and say movie critics should be free to review any movie they want and say what they want, while I agree that critics should be able to review any movie, I think that they should try to understand what they are about to watch.
Big movie critics should be relied on less than they are currently and people should try and focus their reviews based on the audience scores.
Motivation is more controllable than you might think
