Leave it to Michael Bay to turn something already big into something bigger. No, I’m not talking about the “life-size” IMAX version of Optimus Prime. I’m referring to the gap between critic and general audience tastes, often referred to as the “critic-audience divide.” We’ve already seen it get worse this year via terrible yet popular movies like Paul Blart: Mall Cop, but given the $201.2 million grossed by Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen over its first five days, we film writers are feeling the coming apocalypse soooo much more. Remember how last year we thought The Dark Knight made so much money so quickly due to the fact that reviews were so great? Eh, that probably wasn’t the truth after all.
Of course, a success like Transformers 2’s doesn’t exactly prove critics are worthless, only those who function simply as a thumbs up/thumbs down sort of recommendatory guide. Plenty of critics should continue to be worth reading if they’re otherwise good reads and create or allow for discussion without merely saying a film is good or bad. One of my favorite kinds of critic, for instance, is the kind that may turn me onto a film despite him/her having disliked it, as some scathing reviews of Transformers 2 have almost done.
A reader commented on my previous post about Transformers 2 with the claim that all our negative reviews helped the movie be so successful. If that’s the truth, maybe we should start using negative psychology and trash the great little films we really love. Or, we can just stop worrying about the majority audience liking different things as us and enjoy all the death threats we get from mainstream moviegoers when we disagree with them. Isn’t it often better for our sites’ traffic to stir up contention anyway?
Oh well, here’s another crop of critical whinery after the jump:
- Steven Zeitchik at Risky Biz Blog responds to TF2’s success with something he calls the “Fool-ometer”:
We knew the reviews would be fetid. And we knew the box-office would be smashing. But we didn’t know the box-office would be this good and the reviews this bad…[so] we came up with a little measuring tool to gauge just how much audiences disregard critics on a given pic. We call it the Fool-ometer, and it quantifies the gap between audience and critical approval.
It’s a simple formula. To come up with a Fool-ometer score, we took a film’s opening weekend and compared it to its reviewer approval (we used Rotten Tomatoes). So a blockbuster that was well-reviewed, like “Iron Man,” scores in the range of a 1 — in that case, the $98 million it earned opening weekend is just about one time the the 93% of critics who approved. That’s the sort of number you want. “Dark Knight” is slightly higher, but that’s mainly because it earned so damn much.
- Peter Travers at The Travers Take also compares the disappointing success of TF2 with other blockbusters, including Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith:
…the runner-up position in my book goes to Revenge of the Sith, the final and most futile attempt from clumsy director and tin-eared writer George Lucas to create a prequel trilogy to match the myth-making spirit of the original Star Wars saga he unleashed in 1977. I’d still watch Sith five times than endure another five minutes of Trans 2. But that’s just me.
- Dustin Rowles at Pajiba seems disappointed with the world’s moviegoers:
It’s just a goddamn shame that “It doesn’t look good, but I’ll see it anyway,” is worth so much more in box-office dollars than: “That looks amazing, and I’ve heard great things. Maybe I’ll see it on DVD.” What the hell is wrong with this country’s mindset? There are a couple million folks who only venture out of their house once a year to see a movie, and they’ve decided that Revenge of the Fallen was the one movie worth seeing.
- John Cairns at Film School Rejects is mad at some specifically located American moviegoers:
I’m mad that folks in middle America are giving a free pass to all this outrageousness when they didn’t give a free pass to Indiana Jones 4 or these other movies. There were people bitching and complaining about that fridge-nuking, and about Watchmen and Terminator Salvation and other movies for all kinds of things, and to various degrees these movies took a hit at the box office as a result – not so much in the case of last year’s Indiana Jones movie, but definitely with these other two.
- JoBlo.com uses a lot of quotation marks and exclamation points sarcastically in its box office report:
I think TRANSFORMERS 2’s record-shattering opening over the past 5 days has, at the very least, proven one thing: when it comes to summer “blockbuster” movies, film critic reviews don’t matter for shit!!…it seems as though “regular audience” members (you know, those who actually matter!!) could care less, and just wanted to check out a film offering some uber-escapism.
- Eugene Novikov at Cinematical foresees things getting worse in the wake of such success:
Well, don’t we all feel a little silly. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the movie that received the most hysterically negative reviews of 2009 opened to by far the year’s biggest numbers…I hope everyone is looking forward to Transformers 3, where Autobots will discover fart jokes.
- Robert Humanick at The House Next Door anticipated the divide in his review of TF2:
I’m sick of this notion that movie critics don’t like to have fun. Like any broad accusation, it’s pure cop-out, especially when founded on the basis of but a handful of films, as is usually the case. Though a minority opinion in my circles, I liked the first Transformers…Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is to its predecessor like a medieval torture chamber is to a playground, but that won’t keep many from swallowing it hook, line and sinker, quickly and indiscriminately…I mourn the volume of human life being wasted on this thing. If the film makes $100 million this weekend and tickets cost $10 a pop, that’s ten million viewers and a total of twenty-five million hours, not including previews, travel and the time spent earning the wasted money. If the average person lives to be 75, that’s 38 lives. This seems to me a crime…
- Rob Bricken at Topless Robot is kinda glad at least that TF2 didn’t better TDK in its opening:
I have to admit that if Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen had out-grossed The Dark Knight, I would have found it very depressing. Hell, it still kind of bums me out that a movie with almost zero coherence — but plenty of action — got so damn close. Surely no one out there thinks that TF2 was better than Dark Knight, right?
- Dan Hopper at Best Week Ever notes that the TF2 gross isn’t too bad in perspective with the week:
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen grossed $112 million this weekend, which isn’t the saddest or most surprising pop culture story of the past week, but still…
- S.T. VanAirsdale at Movieline responds to Paramount’s data measuring audience approval, which notes moviegoers favor TF2 over even Star Trek:
Right. Like you have to guess who sent the press such “notable facts” from inside Paramount — the same studio, of course, which Bay infamously scolded via e-mail for neglecting Fallen while Star Trek took top marketing priority. Naturally the same LAT excerpt wound up posted this morning on Bay’s own Web site, its last sentence bolded for emphasis like a middle finger to critics, Paramount and anyone else with the slightest lack of faith in him or his masterpiece.
- Robert Fure at Film School Rejects lashes back at the pretentious and whiny film critics:
…critics, with their delicate sensibilities and fragile egos, choose to insult the audience. Choose to insult their own readers. They insist this movie is so bad that anyone who goes and watches it is an idiot. An idiot. Well, my friends and colleagues, at least 70% of the people who walk out of Transformers walk out of it with a big smile plastered on their faces…In the end, the joke is on you. You think you’re big and bad and important, but the box office shows the truth – you’re just an asshole with a microphone. So shut the **** up and let me watch these robots fight each other or I’m going to transform past my boiling point.
- The Playlist doesn’t think anyone should be surprised:
Critics are obviously scratching their heads, but Bay is laughing all the way back to the bank and Paramount shareholders are probably pleased as punch. It’s a bit sad that a spectacle this dumb is rewarded so well, but it’s not like any of us weren’t expecting it.
- Brad Brevet at Rope of Silicon wrote up a lengthy response to an AP story about the movie’s “critic-audience divide” and seems in agreement with the comment I received:
Here’s the deal, audiences were going to see this no matter what. Reviews only helped raise the awareness. Good or bad, it didn’t matter…They are merely a tool for awareness and conversation starters. Critics see a movie, audiences see a movie and the film is discussed and its place in history is decided down the line.
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