Rotten Tomatoes - Critics vs Fans

I'm always fascinated at the wide discrepancies in ratings between critics and fans for some movies, sometimes they are pretty much in-line such as these

The King's Speech 95% critics, 93% fans
Rise of the Planet of the Apes 83% vs 87%
The Dark Knight 94% vs 96%
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 87% to 90%


however this weekend features 2 movies with completely opposing points of view

Haywire: 82% critics but only 54% from fans

Underworld Awakening: 28% versus 80% from the fans, has to be one of the biggest gaps from bad critic reviews to fan opinions I've ever seen.

any other examples of big swings of opinion?

 

And that's opposite of what one would expect from an action movie. I'm very interested in this one and if critics like it but the standard action movie fan doesn't, maybe Soderbergh really did something interesting.

 

I think the Soderbergh factor ups the critical credibility but also makes it a film less likely to be embraced by fans - the guy can make crowd-pleasers but doesn't tend to follow standard filmmaking protocol...

 

Some films are too thought provoking for a non-educated filmgoer to appreciate on first viewing. That's what I credit a high-critic, low-public opinion ratio to.

The opposite is true when you put "spectacle" in a movie. A movie can have a completely incoherent plot but if the gore, exposed body parts or explosions are remarkable, you'll get a low-critic, high-public rating.

 

I don't think this one's so hard to explain. This is the fourth installment in a franchise; people have a pretty good idea of what to expect from it, and they're not going to head out to theatres this early in its run unless they're already predisposed to liking it. But critics have to see it whether they're Underworld fanatics or not. And a lot of the reviewers in the Rotten Tomatoes survey have a bias against horror to begin with — I'm not talking about the most respected critics, but the guys at the minor daily papers who drifted into movie reviewing from the sports or local news pages. (Not that too many horror experts love Underworld either.)

This is weirder, though, and I'm not really sure how to explain it. Yeah, it's an arty and abstract thriller, but still. I remember hearing about how audiences hated Drive, and yet Rotten Tomatoes still gives it 79% from audiences versus 93% from critics (and those scores were in the same ballpark back when it first came out). How about The Limey? Same director, screenwriter, and genre as Haywire. Let's see, critics 92%, audiences 75%. Still a smaller gap.

 

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/one_for_the_money/

3% critics, 67% fans!

 

The Stephanie Plum mysteries by Janet Evanovich have many, many fans.

 

I also suspect that it has as much to do with film critics giving their favorite filmmaker/actor, etc. a pass and the same for audiences.

Some films so radically defy expectations that they fail to resonate when released (for example the 1982 "The Thing" which is largely acknowledged as one of John Carpenter's best films NOW but was roasted by critics at the time and a box office failure due to critical reaction/timing or Roger Ebert's initial reaction to lynch's "Blue Velvet").

The best way to truly find out the value of a film is time. "Vertigo" got mediocre reviews when it was released and didn't rise in appreciation until the 1960's and the reassessment of the New Wave directors/writers.

 

Check it out for yourself: http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/haywire/

 

In the case of Haywire, as I understand it, it's a basic agent-gone-rogue story. But what is really interesting this time around is that Gina Carano can truly kick *ss and it comes across in the movie.

 

Here's an interesting example, Eddie Murphy's "A Thousand Words":

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/a-thousand-words/

0% critics, 61% audience, as of March 12, 2012. 40 critic reviews counted.