Hey there guys,
I know a lot of you might have already heard that entire Rotten Tomatoes theory where Marvel bought the critics so they can bash DC Films and give Batman V Superman Dawn Of Justice a low RT score, but this is not what I think it’s the case.
First of I am a fan of DCEU and I personally would not score the movie with 10/10, it’s not on the same level as TDK, but it does show me potential for a brand new Batman that I would definitely see. We have Wonder Woman which was awesome and brought this great aspect of the superhero world, women that are not only to be saved and courted, but be the center of the movie. Superman I have liked since Man of Steel, so I haven’t changed my opinion. Batman V Superman DOJ in the genre it is I would rate a 7.5, the score is down because I wish they didn’t include Doomsday so early and because they could have easily skipped the Nightmare scene, besides that I think it was a pretty good launch pad for DC.
Now, do I agree with the
Rotten Tomato score, entirely not! Currently sitting on 28 % with a 69 % score from the viewers, I started thinking, what is the reason for the low score.
First of I don’t believe
Disney would pay anyone to bash some DC movie, because once the general audience starts to believe that
CBM are bad and they suck, then we all lose not only DC fans but
Marvel fans as well. Don’t think that movies that make 1 Billion + worldwide rely on sweaty geeks and nerds only.
You guys account for a small portion of that money, maybe around the 25 % maybe a bit more. But there are people that still go to the cinema without being without being
DC or Marvel fans, and they are a huge number – we call them general audience.
Now let’s get back to the scores, Rotten Tomato doesn’t come up with those numbers themselves, they are based on a list of critics that are certified by the site as such and once all critics write their review and score the movie, this makes up for the final score. Now that makes Rotten Tomatoes just a generator and the blame in anyway doesn’t fall on them.
Since we are now much clearer on the process, let’s see what the general assumption is. People used to check only IMDb back in the day where people watch the movie and rate it according to their own personal taste, I must say that 90 % of the time I agree with most of the scores on
IMDb, their top 250 list is pretty much a must watch for cinema fans of all genres.
Currently Batman V Superman has a 7.2 score on
IMDb and as I mentioned above a 28 % on Rotten Tomatoes. What we get on IMDb is the score from the fans, we compare the movie to itself, its ultimate version. The score is 7.2 because fans of Batman v Superman think that the movie could have done this or that, or if the movie deleted this scene and added another scene it could have been 10 in their mind. Apparently fans mostly gave it a 7 or an 8, which we can clearly see in the average. This tells me that most fans have been pretty honest in their opinion and not many gave it a 10, which is out of the question with the editing that the team choose to go with.
I checked some other movies, due to my own theory on both
IMDB and RT, we have Hulk which on RT is sitting higher than Batman V Superman, but in IMDB is much lower 5.7. This I can explain only in one way, people that wanted to see Hulk went did it and thought “well it’s not a 10/10 movie for sure more like 5-6 %, I’ll give it an average score” , critics however gave it a 61 %. I mean don’t get me wrong it’s pretty much on the same level from both critics and fans, there is no divide there. But then I realized that my favorite movie of all time “
The Shawshank Redemption” has the same score on RT as
“Boogie nights”, that is something I couldn’t wrap my head around. I mean one of them is the number 1 movie of all time on
IMDb and the other is missing from the top 250 list entirely, still there are scored the same from the critics.
So it seems to me a movie is judged on
IMDb by on its own merits and its only compared to itself, according to the era it came out in, the level of classic it brings to the genre and the number of people who voted for it. Where with RT when I start reading the opinion of each critic its seems that they are pretty much judging
Batman V Superman based on some un-existing formula that they just came up with and applied only to BVS DOJ. I mean sure it’s not a perfect movie, it’s filled with CGI and all of that, but how does Hulk and the Incredible Hulk beat this one is beyond me.
Now I am not trying to start the
Marvel VS
DC debate with using those movies, but those are the ones that really stuck out to me in terms of similarities in the things I didn’t like.
Abomination –
Doomsday, Hulk had some more out there choices for the pacing and framing of the movie, as well very comic book like.
The critics are not paid off, no one will invest that kind of money just to kill of a franchise which could then back fire in their own garden. They all live in the now, and the now offers them
Light Disney Marvel movies that have jokes, one liners, punchlines and a more PG 13 vibe. They are now accustomed to this formula for a comic book movie. When the
Dark Knight was ruling the box office and getting praised, they accepted dark and gritty, and less funny comic book movies.
They had a beloved director in the face of
Chris Nolan that gave them cult classics before that and they couldn’t escape Heath Ledger’s genre bending villain that transcended comic books and became just a great role. Back then they scored TDK with 94 % and Iron Man the same, where with the exclusion of
RDJR Iron Man had some fun parts, a forgettable villain, not much of a plot development besides the origin story itself and made twice less than
TDK with no serious acting involved by anyone in the cast. The movie proved that
Iron Man can be made into a movie that needed to stay away from the serious tone. Why is that you ask? Well two billionaire, playboy, philanthropist, crime fighters that rely on their skills, no super powers, dressing up in suits to be your neighborhood’s vigilante in the same summer being dark is simply not going to be the case for one of them and we all know Batman is known for being dark way before Tony Stark. Also they didn’t people drawing comparisons to Batman having in mind that there are many to be had.
So no, the critics aren’t getting paid. They are surely hoping on a trend and it’s very easy to critic
Zack and DC right now being a critic, this started with Man of Steel and the promise of a
Nolan produced
Superman movie went right of the door when we saw Superman fly, fight Zod, a more sci-fi Krypton and all of the things that made them realize that Superman isn’t Batman and cannot be grounded in reality in the way that they hoped it would be when they see Nolan as producer.
To be quite honest I thought Man of Steel is a better movies that BVS DOJ, due to the fact in concentrated on one chain of plot, still that movie has a bad score as well on RT because old people wanted to see Superman saving cats from trees and wearing underpants in red, so boooooo Snyder for making a cat unfriendly movie and no sexy underwear for the grandpa that loves Superman.
It’s not like they are going to go against the tide and start praising something that has been bashed 15 months before release and change the perception. You can read some of them, they say some good things overall but at the end they score it lower, because they don’t want to be different and stand out a lot from the crowd. Eventually they managed to hurt the movie financially, with the early release of
Civil War from May to April its surely struggle to get to that billion box office worldwide, unless we don’t get that R Rated 3 hour version in the theatre.
Now don’t get me wrong, they are entitled to their opinion, it’s just that most of the reviews are sounding more and more like a meme posted on
9gag that anything original and fresh coming from a unbiased mind. When I say bias I don’t mean they are Marvel fans, I just mean that they are influenced by the industry’s wind and opinion heavily. It’s the same argument every other review, I mean I paid to see BVS 3 times so far, and even with the things I don’t like (
Doomsday, Nightmare scene, JLA tease) I still think this movie offers more than for example two mutated dogs fighting Hulk and his terrible CGI scenes. I think Ben, Henry, Gal and the rest did a way better job than Eric Bana and Jennifer Connelly acting wise and visually Batman V Superman is a masterpiece that had the bad luck of a studio that tried to fry their entire launch in one 2:30 minutes cut. I don’t think 4 hours would have made a better movie, I just think the script needed some cuts in terms of plot and save the
Justice League tease for later or just tease Wonder Woman and focus on
Batman and Superman more with
Lex being the only villain.
To me those are critics that want to be part of the crowd they are into, that want to be as pop as everyone else and frankly to be 120 % honest, one of the negative reviews I read was written by this
ReelBob character that is 68 years old and had 0 % accuracy in any of his statements about the movie, genre, acting, plot or CGI. The guy is very far away from what is going on in 2016 and should simply make retro reviews of movies like Gone in the wind, something more close of a subject to his young days.
Anyway I know that the Marvel fans will attack me now, but I really do not get impressed by comments I see coming a mile away. It’s a matter of politics as well to be liked in 2016. Whatever you say about the movie, I think it’s fair to say that as bad as you think the movie is, and after all the Martha jokes you posted in the last 3 weeks and beyond your personal bias, this movie is definitely not a 28 % bad movie.
Let’s see if my predictions on Suicide Squad will come to fruition, I call it now 72 % on RT because it will not be humorless.