Critical Dissonance / Film

Sometimes, critics and the public don't see eye to eye.

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Directors and Actors

• Wes Anderson is a rare example of being this among both critics and audience members. Many consider his style too artsy, eccentric, and hipster-ish, while others flock to his movies for the very same reason. He is a very polarizing taste. Some, like The Life Aquatic, are loved by many Anderson fans, but more mixed among critics. Others, like Moonrise Kingdom, are loved by critics but generally mixed among Wes Anderson fans. Still others, like Fantastic Mr. Fox, have gotten almost no attention, either negative or positive, from audience members and critics, and become ignored masterpieces. However, fans and critics alike seem to enjoy The Grand Budapest Hotel, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and Isle of Dogs.
• Ari Aster's first two movies Hereditary and Midsommar were showered with critical praise finding them fresh new takes on horror (90% and 83% on Rotten Tomatoes), but found many more detractors among viewers (D+ and C+ on Cinemascore, while the RT audience scores for both were on the 60s) who found the approach dark enough to not be fun to watch.
• The entire career of Michael Bay is built upon this. The only films of his to get any respect from critics are The Rock and Ambulance, but even those two get somewhat Damned by Faint Praise in critical circles. Yet of them, only Pearl Harbor and The Island (2005) were considered outright flops, and perhaps not coincidentally, both of them saw Bay venture outside his comfort zone (a World War II Epic Movie with Pearl Harbor, a "thinking man's" Science Fiction film with The Island).
  • Armageddon (1998) is notorious as a symbol of the bloated excesses of blockbuster filmmaking in the late '90s, and remains mocked to this day among astronomers and NASA scientists for its staggering levels of multilayered Hollywood Science. It was also the highest-grossing film of 1998.
  • Bay's Transformers Film Series is the exemplar of this trope for him. While the first one has its defenders, critical reception of the sequels was scathing, and fans of the original cartoon and the broader franchise likewise despise them for the many liberties taken with the material. Only with Bumblebee, which Bay wasn't involved in, did any film in the franchise get positive reviews — and that was the lowest-grossing film in the series (though its smaller budget helped to soften the blow). They were also among the biggest box-office successes of the 21st century, with the third and fourth films, Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction, each making over a billion dollars worldwide and the latter being the highest-grossing film of 2014 (the second time a Bay film scored that honor, after Armageddon). However, by the fifth film, The Last Knight, popular opinion fell more in line with that of critics. Although far from a flop, it made the least money of any film in the series, with even the usually lucrative Chinese market drying up unusually quickly. The blame can be pinned on a failed attempt at Pandering to the Base by including copious Product Placement for Chinese products and services that even Chinese audiences knew weren't sold or marketed in the United States.
• Kathryn Bigelow was on both ends of this trope with the two movies she made about The War on Terror, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.
  • Critics lauded The Hurt Locker for being a realistic war movie, but ‘ordinary' viewers were less enthusiastic about it. In fact, some current and former U.S. military personnel who saw it, especially Iraq veterans, felt that it was unrealistic to the point where it was almost insulting. It became the lowest-grossing Best Picture Academy Award winner of all time — and some moviegoers have argued that the award should have gone to Inglourious Basterds or Avatar.
  • Zero Dark Thirty received critical praise, yet it was criticized not by soldiers, but by anti-war activists due to what they saw as a positive depiction of the CIA's Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, especially given that, according to most sources, torture didn't assist in finding Bin Laden in real life.
• Mel Brooks has always been far more popular among average moviegoers than among critics, who usually only single out The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein as his career highlights.
• Tim Burton provides an interesting subversion. His early films managed to be wildly popular despite being ‘artistic', and in fact he was hailed as one of the few auteur-style filmmakers to thrive amidst the blockbuster mentality that prevailed in Hollywood (and in American pop culture generally) throughout the 1980s and most of the '90s (one critic remarked that Burton was adept at "filtering junk culture through an art-school sensibility"). The critics' opinions on him were mixed; however, he seemed to find favor more with elitist critics (such as Pauline Kael) than with populist or at least middlebrow critics (such as Roger Ebert). This despite the fact that Burton himself is no snob, and in his spare time gleefully consumes some of the trashiest entertainments imaginable. Played straight, however, with 1994's Ed Wood: while it was beloved by critics (though ironically having as its biographical subject one of the most reviled film directors of all time), it failed miserably at the domestic box office.
• The Dardenne brothers have made plenty of films in their career that get very high ratings from critics and every movie they put out won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, but on average their films make an average loss of $1 million at the box office. The Walloon government keeps financing their films, however, since they make Wallonia look good.
• Cecil B. DeMille has been called the Michael Bay of The Golden Age of Hollywood for this reason. His movies were among the biggest blockbusters of the first half of the century, but critics remember only The Ten Commandments as actually good cinema.
• Johnny Depp's faced this in The New '10s. It started with the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, as the original was critically acclaimed, and Alice in Wonderland (2010). Critics pilloried them, despairing that he was squandering his gifts by sticking with such Large Ham, Spectacle-driven fare instead of the smaller, ‘serious' films on which he built his artistic reputation. Nevertheless, audiences flocked to them; the second and fourth Pirates films and Alice grossed over a billion dollars each worldwide. When The Lone Ranger, patterned after the Pirates films, became a Box Office Bomb, critics were effectively given free rein to beat up on Depp and his later career choices — never mind that, beyond these ‘wacky' roles paying him well, he enjoys playing them. Given that Depp wasn't an A-lister until the first Pirates caused his popularity to skyrocket, there's an undercurrent of It's Popular, Now It Sucks! to this dissonance. The AV Club spoke up for his choices in a 2014 opinion piece.
• Walt Disney: While many people acknowledge Disney's contributions to animation, film and the fine technical craftsmanship of the drawings, special effects and narratives, many art snobs see him as a prime example of horrible kitsch. His works from The Golden Age of Animation tend to get some recognition, though, but even back then he was criticized for downgrading the artistic achievements by including fluffy Funny Animal characters, a lot of Cuteness Overload, cloying storylines and happy, safe, romanticized fairy tale worlds. Literature fans despise Disney for taking many of the world's most famous novels and fairy tales and turning them into sugar-coated kiddie entertainment which even replaced the original literary masterpieces in the public consciousness. The introduction of the Disney Theme Parks did this reputation no good. Many critics feel Disneyland and the likes are the work of a megalomaniac trying to create a kitsch paradise and get rich off it. As the Disney brand became more corporate-controlled, many feel his cartoons and films became risk-free, formulaic, and devoid of any artistic depth or vision. Worse, these Merchandise-Driven marketing techniques have spread to countless other cartoons, TV shows, and films. Yet, despite all that, the general public still loves Disney with a passion, especially parents with children.
  Walt Disney: To hell with the critics! It's the audience I'm going for.
  • A very odd example is Fantasia. At the time it was Disney's riskiest project and it failed to appeal to both the general audience as well as art fans. Regular viewers felt the cartoon was pretentious, devoid of a story and didn't like the fact that Classical Music and no dialogue were its prime gimmicks. Fans of Classical Music felt Disney downgraded these artistic masterpieces by adding preposterous cartoonish images to them, with the Pastorale segment as a prime example. The outbreak of World War II, which had cut off Disney's very lucrative foreign markets, only made things worse. By the 1960s, however, Fantasia was Vindicated by History as a Cult Classic. Many film and animation fans see it now as a highlight of Disney's artistic vision and feel it is his most artistically interesting picture, because of the experimental nature, Art Shift in some sequences and sometimes controversial imagery. Yet, even so, most general audiences prefer Disney features with an actual story, and even among the people who recognize the artistic value, there are some who dismiss it as the same old Disney kitsch. Some animation historians say the failure of Fantasia was responsible for the aforementioned relatively safe, low-risk storytelling approach that would define his works and his studio for the coming decades, as Walt had taken a lot of pride in making Fantasia with the intent to make more cinema like it, and he suffered a Creator Breakdown when it bombed in theaters.
• Much like Michael Bay, Roland Emmerich is one of the most lucrative directors of today, yet none of his box-office blockbusters has gotten particularly positive reviews from critics. Although he's had a rather notable string of huge critical and financial bombs for his more recent films, suggesting audiences too are beginning to tire of his works.
• David Lynch is very popular among film critics and intellectuals for making innovative cinema that at least tries to do something different. Other moviegoers hate his pictures for being bizarre and arty.
• As shown by the page image, the works of Tyler Perry get consistently negative reviews from critics, but fan response (more specifically the actual target demographic) is positive. As with Michael Bay and The Rock, I Can Do Bad All by Myself is the only film of his to get a critically favorable reception.
• Julia Roberts is one of the biggest and highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, but rarely receives any critical acclaim. A viewing of her filmography on Rotten Tomatoes reveals that her movies usually score higher with the general public than highbrow critics, who typically dismiss them as pandering to the Lowest Common Denominator. This hasn't stopped them from making back their budgets several times over, with Pretty Woman being a prominent case.
• David O. Russell has several films that critics just loved and audiences were more mixed about, but perhaps his most polarizing was American Hustle. While critics absolutely loved it, giving it a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, audiences merely liked it. They argued that the scenery chewing, over-the-top performances were a bit too much, and the accents were … not that accurate.
• Most of Adam Sandler's career is built on this, and it goes both ways. He has said that he stopped reading the reviews of his films as early as Billy Madison, which got negative reviews from critics (he said that "90% of the papers [were] going 'this is garbage'") but became a box-office hit and his Star-Making Role in film.
  • Prior to the 2010s, only two of his star vehicles with an approval rating of at least 50% on Rotten Tomatoes (The Wedding Singer and Happy Gilmore) made back their budgets, while all his sub-50% movies were successful with audiences. For example, while most critics panned The Waterboy, it was one of 1998's highest-grossing movies, while 2002's Punch-Drunk Love ended up being his second most critically acclaimed movie, but also his least financially successful one. In 2019, Sandler received the best reviews of his career with Uncut Gems, with critics praising his Playing Against Type performance in a serious crime thriller and pegging him as an award-season contender, but audiences were much cooler on it, with those expecting Sandler's normal comedic stylings applied to a parody of a crime drama turned off once it became clear that the film was not a comedy. (No surprise in guessing that A24 released the film.) This episode of Really That Good goes into more detail on why audiences (especially kids) in The '90s clicked with Sandler even as the critics dismissed him.
  • With that said, this only applies to his films from the 1990s and 2000s save Uncut Gems, as everyone has since seemed to come into agreement about Sandler. In 2012, critics were especially unkind to Jack and Jill and That's My Boy, and, significantly, both of them failed to make back their budgets (at least in America). Sandler initially experienced a brief comeback with the animated Hotel Transylvania and live-action sequel Grown Ups 2, but the trend returned with Blended, Men, Women & Children, The Cobbler, and Pixels; none of which was reviewed fondly by critics and all of which were box-office underperformers that caused him to start releasing newer films straight to Netflix.
• This happens quite a bit to Steven Soderbergh. As a general rule, when he's working outside of big franchises like the Ocean's films, he tends to get more experimental, in ways that critics and film geeks tend to appreciate but which aren't usually crowd-pleasing.
  • The 2002 remake of Solaris received generally positive reviews from critics (66% on Rotten Tomatoes), but audiences hated it. It received an F grade from audiences polled by CinemaScore.
  • Contagion (2011), holds an 84% on Rotten Tomatoes but a C– on CinemaScore. However, it was at least profitable with over $135 million worldwide.
  • Haywire was well-received by critics (80% on Rotten Tomatoes), who are usually familiar with Steven Soderbergh's films, but hated by audiences (a D– on CinemaScore, 41% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes) who expected a more Hollywood-style action film (the film was even promoted as being like the director's Ocean's Eleven). It barely recouped its budget as a result.
  • Magic Mike, despite being Best Known for the Fanservice (the movie is about male strippers), is actually liked more by critics than by the general public. Its Rotten Tomatoes critics score is 80%, whereas its audience score is 62% and on IMDb is 6.1/10. This may be because a lot of the general public found the fanservice off-putting (especially since it's Female Gaze) and couldn't pay attention to the plot.
  • Unsane was warmly received by critics but met a mixed reception from moviegoers, with an 80% critics' score vs. a 57% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and it went ignored at the box office, only making its budget back because it cost less than $2 million to make.
  • Kimi received highly positive reviews from critics (93% on Rotten Tomatoes), but audience reception was more mixed (a 51% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes).
• The film adaptations of Nicholas Sparks' romance novels have never gotten good reviews, but all have been hits with his core audience.
  • The Notebook has considerable praise by the general public, but the major reaction from critics was mixed. A good example of this is the IMDb rating (7.9 out of 10) compared to the Rotten Tomatoes rating (52%).
  • Safe Haven was ravaged by critics, but it made back its budget at the box office three times over.
  • Rotten Tomatoes outright lampshaded this in the Critics' Consensus for The Best of Me (critics' score of 8%, audience score of 59%), noting that, by that point, Sparks' movies were Critic-Proof.
  "At nine films and counting, the line between Nicholas Sparks film fans and detractors is clear, and The Best of Me will change few minds on either side of the divide."
• Steven Spielberg is the most successful film director of all time, with myriad blockbusters and box office hits. Critical reception is more mixed. Few will question the entertainment values of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park; most critics, however, will prefer his more serious mature stuff like Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan and Munich (which is also an individual case of this; reviewers loved Munich, put it on year-end lists and the film had six Oscar noms... and it was only a mild box office hit - $131 million, when the other two listed gathered at least $300 million - and doesn't get the universal praise of the other two, which are among the top 30 in IMDb's top 250, while Munich has lesser votes and grades). And still, others will heap on Spielberg's movies nothing but scorn for the often infantile themes, sappy moments and obligatory happy endings. The general opinion of this school can be summed up as ‘He is closer to being Disney's successor than Hitchcock's.'
• Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Bruce Willis, and Jean-Claude Van Damme are all among the most recognizable Hollywood stars of The '80s and The '90s, yet most of their pictures are much more popular with average movie watchers than with critics who dismiss these pictures for putting action before substance. Only a few pictures have gotten some kind of critical praise over the years, like First Blood (which wasn't even an action film), The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and the first Die Hard.
• Shirley Temple's popularity in the 1930s was so enormous that she made many average moviegoers forget their troubles for a while — no mean feat in the days of The Great Depression. Yet critics hated her cutesy, namby-pamby family films with a passion.
• The Three Stooges were more popular among children and common people than among critics, who consider their slapstick far too lowbrow and formulaic. It wasn't until The '80s when they finally got their due, as later comedy filmmakers who grew up with the Stooges' short films took influence from them while home video releases made them accessible for a new generation. Ted Okuda and Edward Watz, in their book The Columbia Comedy Shorts, put it thusly:
  "Many scholarly studies of motion picture comedy have overlooked the Three Stooges entirely — and not without valid reasoning. Aesthetically, the Stooges violated every rule that constitutes "good" comedic style. Their characters lacked the emotional depth of Charlie Chaplin and Harry Langdon; they were never as witty or subtle as Buster Keaton. They were not disciplined enough to sustain lengthy comic sequences; far too often, they were willing to suspend what little narrative structure their pictures possessed in order to insert a number of gratuitous jokes. Nearly every premise they have employed (spoofs of westerns, horror films, costume melodramas) has been done to better effect by other comedians. And yet, in spite of the overwhelming artistic odds against them, they were responsible for some of the finest comedies ever made. Their humor was the most undistilled form of low comedy; they were not great innovators, but as quick laugh practitioners, they place second to none. If public taste is any criterion, the Stooges have been the reigning kings of comedy for over fifty years."
• Rudolph Valentino was a hugely popular movie star among female viewers in The Roaring '20s, yet his pictures have always been dismissed as quaint and ludicrous fanservice stories for fangirls. It says a lot that, when his biggest hits The Sheik and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse do get a mention in cinematic history books, it's more for their historic value than their artistic merit.
• M. Night Shyamalan could be the trope codifier. Ever since the movie The Sixth Sense put him on the map for being a director who can throw a good Plot Twist into a story, he hasn't had a good relationship with the critics. Almost every film that has come out by him since then, The Village (2004), Lady in the Water, The Happening, and others have been bashed by the critics. However, this hasn't stopped many of his films from making an average of over 100 million dollars per release.

Films — Animation

• Audiences' opinions were divided about Antz, largely for being perceived as a Darker and Edgier ripoff of A Bug's Life, but critics liked it.
• Most critics either hated or didn't understand the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, but it was well-received by fans, though some of them criticized it for pacing issues.
• Pixar: The studio has garnered a couple of examples over the years.
  • A Bug's Life received critical acclaim from critics when it came out, scoring a 92% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience score however, is a more lukewarm 72%, with many regarding it as one of Pixar's weaker films.
  • Cars 2 was not well-received by critics (38% on Rotten Tomatoes) but audiences flocked to see it as they did with the first (although not to the same extent as previous Pixar movies).
  • While Turning Red has received critical acclaim and high scores across the board by critics, it has quickly become one of Pixar's most polarizing films amongst audiences, with many either agreeing with the critics and finding it to be great film or disliking it due to its art-style, on top of finding the surprisingly adult humor and the puberty subject matter to be too "inappropriate" for a Pixar film. Just for comparison, the film's critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes is an incredibly high 95%, whereas the audience rating is a still positive, but noticeably lower 71%.
• The Disney Animated Canon has a few examples, especially during its two "Dark Ages" (c. 1970–88 and c. 2000–08):
  • Robin Hood (1973) received lukewarm reviews upon release, and has a barely-passable 55% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences then and today, however, love it. The movie has an 81% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and it also has one of the highest IMDb ratings of the pre-Renaissance movies (7.5/10, which is also higher than several later and seemingly more popular movies).^note One of the reasons for this was it was the first "Untouchable" released under Walt Disney Home Video's Walt Disney Classics brand, in 1984, making it immediately accessible for home audiences. It also helped kickstart a generation of furry artists.
  • The Black Cauldron was apparently only released on VHS because of fan protest.^note It wasn't spoken of after its terrible run in theaters in 1985; Disney was finally convinced to release it in a shiny clamshell as one of the later installments in North America and Canada through the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection label in 1998, and internationally through the international Walt Disney Classics label. Yet, it has always had very lukewarm critical reception, and for the record, is barely remembered.
  • The Rescuers has an impressive 85% on RT, while its sequel, The Rescuers Down Under, has a merely passable 68%. Disney aficionados tend to switch the two, with the original being seen as middling and dull and the sequel a vast improvement with beautiful animation.
  • Pocahontas was viewed as ‘pretentious' and hated for being historically inaccurate. Despite this, it still ranks among Disney's most popular films, the main character is still a Disney Princess, and people still have a great love for it.
  • Atlantis: The Lost Empire is the biggest Cult Classic in the Disney canon, despite being generally ignored by critics and a disappointing gross.
  • Brother Bear has been fairly well-received by the Disney fanbase, while Home on the Range has been considered to be one of the worst Disney movies of all time, with some saying that it's just as bad as Chicken Little. Critics, on the other hand, are the complete opposite. Home on the Range got scores that are mostly around 50%, while Brother Bear currently has the second-lowest score of any movie in the Disney Animated Canon on Rotten Tomatoes (Only behind Chicken Little), and is also tied with, again, Chicken Little as the lowest scoring Disney animated movie on Metacritic.
  • Ralph Breaks the Internet received glowing reviews from critics and was regarded as an Even Better Sequel to Wreck-It Ralph, but among audiences and Disney fans it is one of the most contentious entries in the entire Disney Animated Canon and a big-time Contested Sequel for a multitude of reasons (particularly in its overall depiction of the internet, how it handled Ralph and Vanellope's respective character arcs, and the use of cameos from other Disney movies and properties). Compare Rotten Tomatoes' 88% critical score to the not bad but still considerably more lukewarm 65% rating from audiences.
  • Strange World got mostly positive revews from critics with its score at 72% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences had mixed opinions about it; verified audiences have it at a slightly lower 66% compared to the total audience rating of 39%.
  • Wish (2023) received mixed reviews from critics with a score of 48% on Rotten Tomatoes. And while audiences still seem mixed on the film, it's audience score is much more positive, getting an 81%, and it has an A- on Cinemascore.

• DreamWorks Animation's offerings in the mid-2010s also landed in this.
  • Home (2015) received generally mixed reviews from critics (47% on Rotten Tomatoes, the lowest for a DreamWorks movie since Shrek the Third), but was successful at the box office, with an opening weekend of $52 million (the highest opening weekend for a DreamWorks movie since Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted) and had generally positive audience feedback (an A grade from CinemaScore).
  • Reviews for The Boss Baby were very mixed, with a 53% on RT and many unflattering memes making fun of the film's premise. Audiences were much more enthusiastic about the film when it opened at number one and bumped off the live-action version of Beauty and the Beast to No. 2.
  • Critic reviews for The Croods: A New Age skewed toward the mixed side, while most audiences regarded the movie as an Even Better Sequel to the first movie. On RT for example, the film has a modest 75% critical rating while the audience rating is a much more impressive 95%.
• Early Man did much better with critics than with audiences; it has an 81% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but it has a 55% approval rating from audiences on the same site. Its commercial bombing in the United States is easily attributed to the fact that it was released the same weekend as Black Panther (2018).
• Hotel Transylvania received generally mixed critical reception; it currently holds a critics score of 45% ("Rotten") on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences, however, view it quite differently; the audience score on the aforementioned Rotten Tomatoes is currently at 72% ("Fresh"), it set a box-office record for the largest September film opening ever (previously held by Sweet Home Alabama), was the highest-grossing film for Sony Pictures Animation up to that point (previously a record held by The Smurfs), and was an overall box-office success, taking in $358 million worldwide against a modest $85 million budget. Its sequels were similar affairs, albeit with warmer critical reception for each installment. The second was 56% on RT and in fact lower-ranked than the first on Metacritic, but broke the $400 million barrier; the third was the first Fresh on RT, with 62%, and grossed over $500 million.
• Critics were mixed to My Little Pony: The Movie (2017), general opinion being passable without anything noteworthy, getting only 44% on Rotten Tomatoes. But it also got an 86% positive audience score, Cinescore gave it an "A-", and it grossed over $60 million from a $6.5 million budget. In particular were the musical sequences done by Daniel Ingram, which many critics really did not like and compared unfavorably to Lin-Manuel Miranda, but the fans loved and largely believe no one else is better suited for the job.
• The Nut Job was very poorly received by critics (11% on Rotten Tomatoes), but it was successful at the box office (due in part to being released in January and had decent marketing of an indie film) and has down-the-middle audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb.
• Pokémon: The Series
  • Pokémon 2000 was roundly panned by critics, but made quite a bit of money during the summer 2000 season and is among the more well-regarded films among fans.
  • Pokémon 3: Spell of the Unown did poorly with critics on its release. However, fans, such as That Dude in the Suede and Linkara, praised it. They say the battles are some of the best to come out of the movies, has the best story, and love its dark themes.
  • Pokémon: Kyurem vs. The Sword of Justice is considered to be one of the better Pokémon movies (certainly the best of the Unova movies) despite having one of the lowest IMDb ratings of the series, 5.5/10.
  • Conversely, Pokémon: The Rise of Darkrai has one of the higher scores, 6.5/10, but is generally criticized as So Okay, It's Average for how many plot devices had been recycled from the previous movies.
• The Mexican animated film El Santos Vs La Tetona Mendoza. It received more or less good reviews from critics, an opinion which Mexican audiences did not share. And with very good reason: The whole thing is a giant middle finger against Mexican culture.
• The Rugrats Movie was a box office success and was well-received by audiences, but most critics either dismissed the film as being childish or thought it would work better as a Made-for-TV Movie.
• A minor case with Sausage Party. From critics on Rotten Tomatoes, it got an 83% "Certified Fresh" rating. From audiences, it got a much less impressive 52%, a 6.1 on IMDb, and usually a 3-star rating on many retailers like Amazon, namely from those who believe animation is only for children.
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a 2023 movie produced by Illumination in conjunction with Nintendo, received mixed critical reception (currently a barely Rotten 59% on Rotten Tomatoes), but was massively praised by the majority of audiences who saw it in theaters (95% on Rotten Tomatoes, 8.3 on Metacritic, and a CinemaScore rating of A). It received particular praise from Mario fans, who had previously been burned by the infamous 1993 film and were delighted to have an adaptation that fully embraced the spirit of the games.
• The Teacher's Pet movie received mainly positive reviews by critics, getting a 76% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences, however, had mixed opinions with it garnering a 48% approval. The backlash mainly came from moviegoers who were unfamiliar with the series it was based on. Even fans of the series weren't too impressed, citing its short runtime and rushed plot as factors.
• The Transformers: The Movie was trashed by critics for being a 90-minute film about toys, and was not a big hit due to the mass slaughter of beloved characters in favor of new ones. Once the backlash hit Hasbro and they were forced to bring most of the characters back to life, however, it became a cult favorite, even among fans who came into the franchise from newer adaptations.
• Winnie the Pooh
  • Pooh's Grand Adventure got a mixed-to-negative critical reception upon its initial release, with critics particularly citing that the darker themes that it explored, the complex ways that the film explores the characters of Pooh and his friends, and the overall more somber tone were things that had no place in a Winnie-the-Pooh movie. However, these very things are among the things that make the Pooh fanbase consider Pooh's Grand Adventure one of Pooh's best movies.
  • The Tigger Movie likewise received a mixed critical reception, but is also very well-regarded among the Pooh fanbase for its extraordinary exploration of Tigger's character and great songs.
• Ballerina was not well liked by critics nor had strong marketing, but it ended up as a box office success regardless, mostly in its home country of France.

Films — Live-Action

• Act of Valor was poorly received by the critics who saw it (29% on Rotten Tomatoes) but most of its audience (mainly the ‘support-our-troops' crowd) tends to love it (84% on the same website).
• Ad Astra: The film received very positive reviews from critics, but had a much colder reception from general audiences, with a 83% critic consensus versus only a low 40% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, a relatively low B- grade from CinemaScore, and it was a Box Office Bomb.
• Alita: Battle Angel polarized critics, who praised its special effects and Rosa Salazar's lead performance but found the story to be unwieldy. While it wasn't the box-office disaster that many had feared, it still depended on overseas box office to turn the small profit that it did. Among moviegoers who did see it, however, it was widely praised, with fans of the original manga and anime in particular hailing it as one of the best Hollywood film adaptations of manga in general. Its critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes sits just on the edge of Fresh at 61%, but its audience score is a towering 92%.
• American Sniper attracted harsh criticism from antiwar activists like Michael Moore and many news personalities, has been compared to Nazi recruitment films, and generally has met with venom-spewing hatred from anyone who sees it as a glorification of the Iraq War. Others, including veterans of that war, said that Chris Kyle, the titular sniper, was no hero but a dangerously unbalanced man whose autobiography of the same name (on which the film is based) is a bunch of lies. Overall, critics seemed to like it, but many were also turned off by the premise and the potential lack of truth in it. As for the audience? It broke several box-office records, wound up being the highest-grossing film of 2014 (in the American market, anyway) and earned a rare A+ on CinemaScore.
• Mere days after the release of Annie (2014)^note (aside from the leak), the sharp contrast between negative reviews and overall positive reception from the public was already glaring. Four days following release, there was a 30% difference between the critic and audience numbers for the film on Rotten Tomatoes.
• The Assistant, a film about a Day in the Life of a Beleaguered Assistant on the sidelines of a Bad Boss's Casting Couch behavior, was a hit with critics for its extremely subtle, nuanced and minimalist presentation, earning a 91% score. Mainstream audiences, however, largely rejected the film for the same reasons, describing it as a boring film where nothing happens and giving it a miserable 25% score.
• August Rush, the story of an incredibly gifted musical child, got a 37% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, but an 82% from fans.
• Barbarian was utterly adored by critics, praising its unconventional narrative structure and masterful use of tension. But audiences were heavily polarized by it. A significant of general moviegoers found its sudden Mood Whiplash and slight Genre Shift to feel off-putting and ruined the horror of the film. And many of said audiences questioned the film's numerous plot holes.
• Because I Said So was hated by critics for being a Cliché Storm and has an abysmal 4% from them on Rotten Tomatoes, but received a significantly kinder 65% from audiences.
• Belle (2013) got good reviews, but the audience was not very excited about it. German critics described the film as good, solid "educational cinema" that "doesn't whip up feelings" … which may explain why it passed into oblivion, with hardly anyone having seen it, or even heard of it, in 2015, one year after release. Telling people that something is educational is a good way to keep them from wanting to see it, after all.
• The action film Billy Jack and its sequel, The Trial of Billy Jack, were viewed as jokes by critics in The '70s, but they were so popular with audiences that star, director and co-writer Tom Laughlin organized an essay contest in which fans wrote rebuttals to the terrible reviews that Trial received.
• Bio-Dome is widely considered one of the worst comedies ever. Yet it seems to have found a few supporters, as its IMDB grade is a fairly average 4.5 and the Rotten Tomatoes audience score is 51% (compared to a 4% approval by critics).
• Bohemian Rhapsody met a reception from critics that, while more positive than not, was still rather lukewarm, with them praising the concert scenes and Rami Malek's performance as Freddie Mercury but criticizing its historical inaccuracies and its strict adherence to the "rock star biopic" formula. Audiences were able to overlook the latter and embrace the formula, such that, while its critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes is just barely Fresh at 61%, its audience score is a rapturous 94%. The film also features an In-Universe example, with shots of (real life) contemporary music reviews being overlaid while the band is writing the titular song, before cutting to a chart showing the song's immense popularity; hilariously enough the sequence reflects the film's real-world reception pretty well (audiences love it, critics think it's mediocre).
• Bonnie and Clyde polarized critics on initial release, as much for its graphic content as for the quality itself. Newsweek critic Joe Morgenstern called it a "squalid shoot-'em-up for the moron trade", and New York Times critic Bosley Crowther was so horrified by the film's bloody violence and lighthearted treatment of its real-life Villain Protagonists that it turned him into a Moral Guardian, spending the rest of his life campaigning against violence in film. Word of mouth, however, made the film a blockbuster among younger audiences, including some new-school film critics like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael, and its critical reputation would improve in the coming years as one of the foundational films of the New Hollywood movement. Notably, Morgenstern would change his mind upon rewatching the film, giving it a far more positive review that would be heavily promoted by Warner Bros., while Crowther (who never changed his poor opinion on the film) would lose his job at the Times and be replaced by Kael due to how out-of-touch his review was regarded as.
• The Boondock Saints was trashed by critics as a 'poor man's Tarantino,' holding a 19% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from professional critics … and a 92% from fans on the same site (as well as a 7.9 on IMDb), who have turned the film into a Cult Classic and a St. Patrick's Day tradition.
• Bright was panned by critics but liked by audiences.
• Bug did alright with critics, who mostly thought the ending was bad, but otherwise liked it. Audiences, however, almost collectively hated the film, with it receiving an F on Cinemascore. Though this is mostly because the film was advertised as a horror film when it was really a psychological drama/tragedy.
• The Butterfly Effect got a 33% rating on Rotten Tomatoes but a 81% audience rating, and a 7.7/10 on IMDb. It was also a box-office success.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was well-liked by critics. Audiences, however, who were less likely to be familiar with the original book, instead considered it to be a badly-done remake of the classic 1971 film version, and gave it mediocre reviews.
• Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) received mixed reviews from critics (though Ebert and Roeper both liked it), but it did well with audiences. It was also lucky enough to get only one Golden Raspberry Award nomination.
• Christmas Eve, a forgettable 2015 film starring Patrick Stewart, has a rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, but audiences gave it a barely-fresh 61%.
• Chasing Mavericks got a 31% rating on Rotten Tomatoes but was scored better with audiences.
• Orson Welles' most famous film, Citizen Kane, was received with critical acclaim and box-office indifference (mostly caused by being backlashed by none other than William Randolph Hearst). When it won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, the crowd tried to boo the announcer off the stage. Nowadays, it's a Sacred Cow beloved by both the public and critics.
• Cloud Atlas received polarizing but mostly positive reviews (Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars and called it one of the most ambitious films ever made) and was nominated for a number of awards. Audiences, however, roundly ignored the film, and it ended up becoming a Box Office Bomb.
• Cuties suffered this big time. It was received very well by most critics with an 87% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but audiences were far harsher, resulting in only 15% on the same metric. This divide is almost entirely to do with the risqué subject matter and the nigh-unavoidable controversy it invites, that being how it depicts and handles the sexualization of its preteen characters — critics were more inclined to accept it as part of a challenging Coming of Age Story in addressing a taboo, yet poignant challenge faced by its characters (with an understanding that the sexual presentation being uncomfortable is itself the point; not meant to be seen as an endorsement), but wider audiences were far more merciless, thrashing the presence of sexualizing young girls on principle, as well as being far too close to what it criticizes to be acceptable. Netflix's disastrously bad marketing campaign that seemed to present the preteen sexualization at face value as a selling point likely didn't help in preventing audiences from going in with full expectation to be disgusted.
• The Film of the Book of Daisy Miller received a rare 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 6 critics, but a measly 23% from audiences.
• This was a trend for the DC Extended Universe:
  • Downplayed with Man of Steel, which has a rating of 55% with critics and a 75% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. That said, it really polarized hardcore Superman fans due to the liberties taken with the source material (not just the costume, either). Despite this, it had very positive audience reactions and word of mouth, and collected the highest-grossing June opening weekend of all time.
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is incredibly polarizing. The vast majority of critics panned the film, with one memorable headline calling it "A Crime Against Comic Book Fans." Audiences were harder to pin down. Many sites were review-bombed with perfect scores about a day before the film came out, but the voices and user reviews since then haven't been anywhere near as vitriolic as the critics, finding it a flawed but entertaining film. This has been reflected in the box office with a start with a solid $166 million opening weekend only to be followed with a 68% second weekend drop despite the lack of competition; for comparison, Batman & Robin was considered the worst Batman film, yet it dropped only 63% for its second weekend. Over the years, it's received some Vindicated by History thanks in part to the Better on DVD "Ultimate Edition" and the release of Zack Snyder's Justice League.
  • Suicide Squad was utterly trashed by critics, but was much more popular with viewing audiences. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 26% critical average versus a 60% audience score. Certain fans responded by trying to have Rotten Tomatoes taken offline.
  • Justice League has a 40% critic score, but a 75% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. However, the film was a Box Office Bomb and fans called for WB to release Zack Snyder's original cut of the film without Joss Whedon's reshoots after more information came to light that the film was much more heavily reworked than originally let on following Snyder's departure from the project. Eventually, the director's cut, titled Zack Snyder's Justice League, was released in March 2021 to good critical reception (getting 71% from critics, a marked improvement over Snyder's previous DC output) and 95% from audiences.
  • Downplayed with Aquaman. Although the Rotten Tomatoes score is Fresh and it proved that the success of Wonder Woman (the only DCEU film at the time that was near-universally praised by critics, fans and general audiences alike) wasn't a fluke, it was still considered just "pretty good" rather than great. The tone especially polarized critics, with some loving its Genre Throwback to '80s fantasy, cartoons and shōnen anime and others thinking that it was just ridiculous and hard to take seriously. Audiences loved it anyway, often because of how over-the-top it was with its action and story, giving it an A- CinemaScore.
  • Black Adam (2022) veered into winning back fans of Zack Snyder's vision and met with negative critical reception in the process, but like earlier films of the DCEU, also received very positive reception among fans for the same reason. Unfortunately, it still wound up failing in the box office.
• Death Wish 3 has a negative critical reception, but has a positive fan reception.
• The live-action Diary of a Wimpy Kid film series received mixed and mediocre reviews from critics but is absolutely adored by audiences and fans of the books.
• The Die Hard franchise:
  • Die Hard with a Vengeance was somewhat divisive to critics (though its reputation has improved since then), but was still the highest-grossing film of 1995 and well-received by fans.
  • Live Free or Die Hard was hailed as a return to form for the series, as well as a true sequel to the first, by critics. However, despite all the moviegoers and series fans who enjoyed it, it quickly turned into the series' most divisive entry thanks to accusations of using Invincible Hero, complaints about Justin Long and its series-unusual PG-13 rating.
• Disney Live-Action Remakes:
  • Aladdin (2019) and The Lion King (2019) both met with mixed reviews from professional critics (Tomatometers of 56% and 52% respectively, and Metascores of 53 and 55) and are punch lines among Disney fans... but also enjoy A Cinemascores, audience Tomatometers of 94% and 89%, and Metacritic user scores of 6.6 and 6.4. Notably, Aladdin released during the first weekend in which Rotten Tomatoes began requiring that people verify their ticket stubs (and thus confirm that they saw the movie) in order for their reviews to be counted towards the audience Tomatometer.
  • Mulan (2020) got good reviews, praising its visual spectacle and performances, but audiences found it a very underwhelming update to a beloved animated feature (and particularly not a film worth spending $30 plus a Disney+ subscription for), criticizing it for removing what made the original memorable in the first place, with almost no humour, Mushu being completely absent and Mulan lacking any real character arc. It has a 72% approval of Rotten Tomatoes and a 66 Metascore, but the audience score is at a mediocre 46%, the IMDb rating is a meager 5.4/10, and its Metacritic user score is a dismal 3.0.
  • Peter Pan & Wendy received mixed but overall positive reception from critics, with a 64% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 61 Metascore, but was savaged by Disney fans (11% audience score, 1.5 Metacritic user score) for its dull Real Is Brown color palette and sluggish pacing (some viewers also disliked the Adaptational Diversity, but that's a subject for another page).
• The film adaptation of Mötley Crüe biopic The Dirt received a 38% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was bashed for not being a good movie for the #MeToo era. On the flipside, it received a 95% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, became one of the most watched Netflix original movies, and resurrected the band's popularity to the point where they officially announced their reunion in 2019. Fitting, as it mirrored the critical/audience reception of the band it was based on.
• The film adaptation of Divergent received mixed reviews from critics, but was generally well-received by audiences and fans of the book it was based on, handily beat out the much better-received Muppets Most Wanted, and had a massive $55 million opening — about $2 million more than the latter would make in its entire run.
• Don't Breathe 2 has on Rotten Tomatoes a Rotten critical score of 41% compared to a Fresh audience score of 85%. Ironically, the original film had a higher critical score than its audience score. Audience members who didn't like the original film probably skipped this one.
• Don't Look Up received mixed reviews from critics, who thought it was well-made and saw its message calling for action on Global Warming as well-intentioned, but also felt that its satire was too heavy-handed and mean-spirited. However, it debuted at #1 on Netflix and became the second-most watched film on the platform in its first month of release. It also received many nominations from major award bodies, was named one of the best films of 2021 by the American Film Institute and the National Board of Review, and is considered to be a serious Oscar contender. It was also unanimously praised by climate scientists, who saw it as an accurate, if satirically exaggerated, portrayal of what they go through. The contentious discourse around it has become so infamous that it's eclipsed actual discussion about the film itself, with the film's defenders (including writer/director Adam McKay) arguing that many of the critiques made of it ironically mirrored the behavior of certain characters in the film and its detractors countering that people were letting their support for the film's politics cloud their judgment.
• Drumline earned praise from critics with an 82% score on Rotten Tomatoes. IMDb users, however, didn't feel the same way, as it only has a rating of 5.6.
• Dumb and Dumber received mixed reviews from critics at the time, holding only a 66% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 41 on Metacritic. Even the critics who liked it thought it was stupid, and that Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels were the only reasons why it worked. Audiences, however, loved it, and it was a box-office smash that has held its stature since, viewed nowadays as one of the greatest comedies of the '90s.
• Eden Lake received heavy acclaim from reviewers, but is extremely divisive among horror fans. Some people thought that, for the realistic way it presents itself, the plot was implausible to the point of being ridiculous, and that the movie goes too far by having such sadistic violence being committed by young teens, with many viewers finding it far too uncomfortable to sit through. Those who do like it find it scary precisely because of how young the antagonists are, given that many gruesome crimes in Real Life have been committed by children, and believe that the solid acting makes up for the writing's shortcomings. Its extreme Downer Ending is also divisive, with some calling it too traumatizing and unrealistic and others seeing it as fresh due to so many modern horror films having happy endings.
• Enough was panned by critics with a 22% on Rotten Tomatoes, but audiences were much more accepting giving it a 67%. A lot of this seems to have to do with viewers prioritizing the "female empowerment/hero prevails" theme, while completely overlooking the film's obvious flaws, such as consistent reliance on cliches and lack of depth and characterization.
• Entourage received a Tomatometer score of 32% from critics and a score of 84% from audiences.
• Equilibrium has a 37% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but has a score of 7.6 out of 10 on IMDb.
• The Disney+ documentary Fauci received generally favorable reviews from critics, with it holding an 86% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, but on that same website it received an abysmal 2% from audiences. Metacritic has a similar discrepancy, with a 70/100 from critics and a 0.6/10 from audiences. IMDb meanwhile has it at a modest 6.5, although if one looks closer one finds that an "alternate weighting calculation" was applied due to "unusual voting activity", and the actual unweighted score is 1.7. Presumably, this discrepancy is due to Anthony Fauci's controversial and heavily scrutinized handling of the Covid-19 pandemic (with the possible influence of his controversial handling of the HIV/AIDS epidemic).
• Five Nights at Freddy's (2023) was eviscerated by critics who were highly critical of the film's plot, pacing and lack of scares. Critics and audiences not familiar with the source material were also dissapointed over the film's PG-13 rating despite the game's dark and gruesome nature. With the film having a 32% critics score. Unsurprisingly, given how its based on a successful franchise its fans came in droves to defend the film, giving it a 87% audience score. This is also partly due to the fact the film's main (and perhaps only) appeal was that it was loaded with easter eggs and references to the games for fans to find.
• While Flightplan (2005) received largely mixed feelings from critics and audiences alike who declared it as a mostly fine, but quite silly film considering the far-fetched scenarios, the general public is much more harsh on the plot contrivances, factual inaccuracy, and focus on style over substance than critics.
• Ghostbusters (2016) has a mild case of this; critics gave the film largely mixed to positive reviews, and the film's Rotten Tomatoes page reflects this with a 74% Certified Fresh rating, whereas audiences were more mixed, with 49% on the same site. However, taking only the top critics' reviews into account gives a similarly-mixed 59%. And in spite of opening atop the charts, the film's big budget also made it a Box Office Bomb, largely because of the severe online backlash.
• Ghostbusters: Afterlife got a modest but not amazing 62% score Rotten Tomatoes from critics, who generally found it took itself and the previous films too seriously, while it got an overwhelming 95% from audiences, who almost universally loved it because it was so reverent of the previous movies. Audiences alone caused it to become the ninth highest grossing film of 2021.
• A strange example for the South African film classic The Gods Must Be Crazy - most critics gave the film positive reviews but it was nominated for Worst Picture at the 1984 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards (the Stinkers being the long-gone Spiritual Predecessor to the Razzies). The organizers claimed it was nominated "for being a disappointing comedy", however it's clear they actually nominated the film because of other circumstances.
• The Godzilla films have always faced this.
  • The original Godzilla (1954), when it first premiered in Japan just nine years after the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was utterly hated by critics, who felt that it was exploiting the tragedy in the name of spectacle. It didn't help that, in March of the year it came out, a Japanese fishing boat was exposed to radiation from the nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, producing history's first victim of the hydrogen bomb. Since then, however, it has been recognized as a classic sci-fi horror film, in many ways because of the parallels it draws to the atomic bombings and how it uses the monster as a metaphor for such, and Godzilla and kaiju in general have become icons of Japanese cinema.
  • When it comes to the sequels, critics often prefer the more serious films like The Return of Godzilla or Shin Godzilla, where it's just Godzilla going on a rampage while the Puny Humans beneath him fight to survive, while the Monster Mash "kaiju battle" entries where Godzilla fights other monsters are seen as fairly junky B-movies. Those "Godzilla vs." movies are typically fan favorites, however, with the foes that Godzilla does battle with often having their own significant fandoms, and speculation on sequels often concerning which monster(s) Godzilla will fight in the next one.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) took a pasting from critics who saw it as spectacle without substance, the plot and characters being little more than an excuse to get to scenes of monsters pummeling each other. In other words, a film that served as the purest translation of the aforementioned "kaiju battle" films that Hollywood had ever made, and so, like those films, it largely won the approval of longtime Godzilla fans, who helped propel it to an 88% audience Tomatometer versus a 40% critics' rating.
  • Interestingly enough, King of the Monsters itself can be seen seen as a direct response to the reception of its prequel, Godzilla (2014), which received respectable reviews from critics for focusing much more on the human characters over the title character, but was disliked by several of the series' fans for that very reason.
• Gothika made back more than triple its $40 million budget despite being critically reviled.
• When MoviePass, a subscription-based film ticketing service, got into producing its own content with the Mob drama Gotti, they attempted to invoke this by running an AstroTurf campaign to spam positive audience reviews for Gotti on Rotten Tomatoes, then running ads aiming to capitalize on this by pushing a 'critics vs. the average moviegoer' narrative that compared the critics who wrote scathing reviews (its critics' score on RT is 0%) to "trolls behind a keyboard". Putting aside the question of why critics would suddenly want to attack a movie that wasn’t even screened for them in the first place,they were busted pretty quickly once people took a closer look at the reviews and the accounts making them.
• The Great Gatsby (2013) got mixed reviews for its overblown style, but it did very well at the box office and is well-liked by many.
• Reviews for Gretel and Hansel were mixed, but not terrible, with a Tomatometer just on the wrong side of Rotten at 59% and reviews praising the visuals but criticizing the storytelling. Audiences, especially outside the horror geek community, found it boring and weird, and left it with a 21% audience Tomatometer and a C- on Cinemascore.
• Grumpier Old Men, the sequel to Grumpy Old Men, was given largely negative reviews from critics (it has a 17% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes) for being a tired rehash of the first film. Fan responses are much kinder (62% audience score on RT and 6.6 out of 10 on IMDb).
• Gunday has a 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (based on seven reviews), but a 1.9 rating on IMDb. It was actually once #1 on the Bottom 100, though it has since dropped down to #23. Much of this comes down to an extremely vocal base of criticism, though — Bangladeshi audiences absolutely despised the film for the artistic license it took with the Bangladesh Liberation War, and drove the film's IMDb score into the gutter in response.
• Hail, Caesar! was well liked by many critics, with a solid 84% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences, however, were much more mixed, with a mere 46% Audience Score, and a disappointing C- on CinemaScore. This was probably due to the film's reliance on obscure satirical jabs at both old-time Hollywood and current Hollywood, as well as its non sequitur series of events, which understandably alienated the common audience member, but was liked by the critics and viewers who understood the jokes.
• The Hangover Part II. Critics bashed it (for among other things, recycling the plot while adding gross-out factor), audiences loved it.
• Critics reviewed Hellboy (2019) unfavorably, with the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score sitting at 15%, but audiences were much more favorable (but still mixed overall), having an audience score of 60% as of this writing.
• The first part of Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Hobbit, An Unexpected Journey, received mixed to positive reviews, even without considering the debate over the High Frame Rate version (it helps that it's often considered to be overlong and was a Tough Act to Follow to a highly acclaimed trilogy). Nonetheless, by the end of only its third weekend in release, it earned over half a billion globally (and finished its BO run with over a billion, the second Tolkien adaptation to do so). While barely registering as "Fresh" at 65% on Rotten Tomatoes among critics, audiences give it a much higher 83% Fresh.
• Hocus Pocus - those who know the film for its cult following and enduring multimedia spinoffs might be surprised to know that the critical consensus at the time of its release was “mediocre family film” and that it has a crummy 38% on Rotten Tomatoes.
• Home Alone received mixed reviews and Home Alone 2 was utterly panned, but both were box-office successes and have become beloved Christmas fixtures, and Kevin's scream face has become almost as much of a pop-culture icon as the Munch painting that inspired it.
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is very divisive, especially in terms of this trope. It received a 53% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 46% on Metacritic, but spent four weeks as the #1 film in the US, and was the highest-grossing movie of 2000 domestically, with $260 million. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards, winning for Best Makeup (which, if you've seen the behind-the-scenes footage, is very well-deserved), and was nominated for two Razzies, but won neither.
• I Care a Lot has a very positive 78% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the audience score is less than half at 34%, mostly for how the plot deals with utterly despicable people, as put by the Audience Consensus:

  Rosamund Pike and Peter Dinklage do good work, but they're acting in a dark and ugly story that doesn't give the audience anyone to root for.

• The Indiana Jones franchise:
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was initally acclaimed by most critics and has a 78% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Yet its score on IMDb is 6.4, and hardcore fans felt it was disappointing, especially due to its reviled Twist Ending. Retrospective reviews from critic are more negative, largely for the same criticism that viewers complained.
  • Conversely, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny had a rough start, as its plan to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival unfortunately backfired as the film was received divisively by critics there, despite it receiving a 5-minute standing ovation. This made it start off with a 45% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. However, once other critics and audiences got their hands on it, the film was received much more positively, with both critics and long-time Indy fans agreeing that the film brought back the charm and fun that was lacking from Crystal Skull. The film now sits at a 69% critics score and an even higher 88% audience score.
• Identity Thief was eaten alive by critics, but received an "B" on CinemaScore and was a box-office juggernaut.
• Critics are mixed on Into the Woods but overall are leaning more on the positive side. Audiences, on the other hand, are even more mixed on the film, with a 53% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
• Critics looooove the horror film It Follows. Audiences are much more mixed, though generally positive. (A 65% on Rotten Tomatoes isn't bad, after all.)
• Jingle All the Way was poorly received by most critics, with most of the few positive reviews feeling that it was merely Narm Charm or So Bad, It's Good. However, it was fairly successful with audiences and was a box-office success. After decades being watched on the holidays, the gap remains, as every attempt by modern-day critics to bash it gets drowned out by nostalgia for the film.
• When Joker was first released, critics either loved it or hated it; there was next to no middle ground. On one hand, it won the Golden Lion and a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, with many praising Joaquin Phoenix's performance as The Joker and its Genre Throwback to the crime thrillers of the '70s and '80s, but on the other, there were quite a few critics who felt that it was nihilistic and too sympathetic to its Villain Protagonist, with some even expressing the fear that it could inspire some fans to commit mass shootings. Its Tomatometer stands at 69%, indicating that more critics fell into the former camp than the latter, but approval was far from unanimous. Among audiences, on the other hand? It became the first R-rated film to gross over a billion, and its 8.8 IMDb score is downright rapturous.
• Juno. Highly acclaimed by critics, and grossed over thirty times its independent budget, but is one of the most despised films on the internet. Just go to its IMDb page, you'll see that the entire first page of reviews considered the most helpful are all negative.
• Jurassic World Dominion got a 29% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, making it by far the lowest rated entry in the franchise, but a 77% with audiences and was a box office hit (although audience ratings on Metacritic and IMDb were more mixed, at 4.9 and 5.7, respectively; the lowest rated entries of the franchise on both sites).
• Justin Bieber's Never Say Never was a massive hit thanks to his fanbase, but reviews were so-so and general audiences could not care less. The sequel, Believe, bombed terribly because most of his rabid tween followers had grown up and abandoned him.
• Kick-Ass 2 was poorly received by critics and most filmgoers (as the dip in both review aggregators and the box office numbers shows). However, many of the fans of both the film and the comic loved it — 41 on Metacritic, 28% on Rotten Tomatoes… and a user score of 78 and 69% respectively.
• The urban thriller Kicks received great reviews from critics with an 81% on Rotten Tomatoes. Its IMDb score however is at an alarmingly low 4.5/10 because... Air Jordans? Fortunately, this trope gets downplayed when you look deeper into the rating and find out that all of the 900+ users who downvoted it are anonymous with no prior activity on the site, suggesting that the rating was rigged. The responsible parties and their motivation behind the fabricated bad rating remain ambiguous, though Wired caught wind of this.
• Killing Them Softly reteamed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford's star Brad Pitt with its director Andrew Dominik. It opened to critical acclaim, was hailed by many critics as one of the best crime dramas in years … and also received an F grade from filmgoers polled by CinemaScore, one of only two movies that year (the other being The Devil Inside, which saw far more agreement between critics and moviegoers) to be dishonored in such a manner. Needless to say, it bombed in theaters and became Pitt's lowest-grossing wide-release film in nearly two decades (though it still made $37 million worldwide with a $15 million budget).
• Kung Pow! Enter the Fist was received poorly by critics, but is a Cult Classic for its lowbrow comedy and So Bad, It's Good nature.
• Critics gave The Last Castle largely mixed reviews, as indicated by its 52% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences were a lot more forgiving, giving it 75%.
• The Last Exorcism has a 72% critics' Tomatometer, but only a 35% audience score and a Cinemascore of D. Critics embraced its subversion and deconstruction of the tropes of Demonic Possession movies, while audiences, expecting a more conventional example of that genre, were put off by the same. In particular, its ambiguous ending reportedly had audiences yelling obscenities at the screen.
• Law Abiding Citizen earned $126 million worldwide and has a good IMDb score of 7.4 out of 10. Reviews were mostly scathing due to plot holes and excessive violence.
• Let Me In got rave reviews from film critics, but did so-so at the box office. Some people believe that the low turnout was due to people who refused to go see it out of sheer bitter spite (or on simple principle) because it's an American remake of a foreign film. But what really killed Let Me In was distributor Relativity Media (who acquired the film from Starz due to buying the Overture distribution outlet from them) giving the film the Invisible Advertising treatment. There were few trailers or TV spots released and the film wasn't even listed on Relativity's website. Not helping the film was that the company chose to open it the same day as The Social Network (a film Relativity co-financed with Sony).
• Controversial documentary Leaving Neverland received mostly positive reviews from critics, but the majority of audiences gave it mixed to scathing reactions, particularly among Jackson fanatics.
• Licorice Pizza was praised by critics for its direction, the performances of the cast, and its nostalgic 1970s setting, and earned itself three Oscar nominations. However, it polarized audiences due to its plot being more of a random sequence of events than an actual plot and for attracting two major controversies: a scene where a white restaurant owner mocks his Japanese wife using a stereotypical Asian accent, which is Played for Laughs, and the eventual Age-Gap Romance between the two main characters, a 15-year-old and a 25-year-old, which is played as a happy ending for both characters, two things that understandably pissed lots of people off.
• Life Itself (not to be confused with the Roger Ebert documentary of the same name) was met with a 14% Rotten Tomatoes score despite the involvement of Dan Fogelman. However, audiences were much kinder.
• Critics ate The Life of David Gale alive, giving it a 19% on Rotten Tomatoes. It was more positively received by filmgoers, who have given it an 81% audience rating on that site, as well as a 7.5 on IMDb.
• The Little Rascals (1997) has a 23% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a 45/100 on Metacritic... and a grade of A- on CinemaScore, the only one of the three that includes general audience ratings instead of just critics.
• The Lost Daughter is slow-paced, has quite a bit of Padding, delivers a contemplative message on the pressure that society places on mothers largely through lots of subtext and symbolism, and has an Ambiguous Ending that still leaves lots of questions open and up to viewers to decide. As such, it appealed to critics and Academy members but wasn't very well-liked by audiences, who just found it to be boring.
• Malignant downright has "love it or hate it — and there isn't much in between" as its audience consensus on Rotten Tomatoes, which is an almost clean split of 52% given people either embraced the unorthodox approach or got severely disappointed by it. Reviewers were more on the former camp, as shown by the higher 76% critical score.
• For the critics of the time, Mandalay was no better than your run-of-the-mill B-Movie. Especially, since Kay Francis, maliciously nicknamed "box office poison" had the lead role. The audience held it in much better regard, to the point of the film becoming extremely profitable for its creating studio. It later became Vindicated by History.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Eternals became the first MCU movie to miss a Fresh score on RT with an unimpressive 48% because reviewers didn't feel the movie fulfilled its huge ambitions, but the audiences reacted more positively with 78%.
  • Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has even greater dissonance, with a critical RT Score of 48% and an audience score of 84%.
• You would be forgiven for thinking everyone who saw both Matrix sequels loathed them even though they both turned profits during their respective theatrical runs. But while Revolutions' significantly lower gross lines up with its critical 36% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 47 on Metacritic,^note Users of those sites give it 60% and 4.7/10 respectively, plus a 6.7/10 on IMDb. Reloaded actually got mixed to positive reviews (73% on Rotten Tomatoes, 62 on Metacritic^note And fans gave it 72% and 6.9/10 respectively, plus a 7.2/10 on IMDb.).
• The indie western Meek's Cutoff is infamous for this: critics love it for its unorthodox, realist take on its genre, whereas average moviegoers are left disappointed by its slow pacing and inconclusive ending.
• Meet the Mormons was ripped to shreds by critics, earning an 18% on Rotten Tomatoes with critics. However, it got a 89% audience score and was a box-office bonanza, especially in the LDS community.
• The Metro Manila Film Festival has a number of interesting examples: films which are of mass appeal, e.g. the likes of those starring Philippine box-office figures such as Vice Ganda and Vic Sotto, would be grilled by critics for being nothing more than Lowest Common Denominator rubbish, yet audiences flock to it en masse (especially as entries for the said film festival debut in local theatres every Christmas) looking for a quick laugh or two. Niche entries like Ang Larawan may fare much worse at the box office, and are mostly scoffed off as "boring" or too highbrow for the "masa" to comprehend, but are critically well-received. And it gets interesting when IMDB user ratings for Gandarrapiddo and My Little Bossings are contrary to what masa^note A Filipino term for the mainstream, i.e. middle- to lower-class people. moviegoers say, especially in commercials promoting said films.
• The Nicolas Cage Horror Comedy film Mom and Dad had an overall positive critical reception (it has a 74% Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer rating), but audience opinions were more mixed (it has a 39% audience rating on the same site, as well as an IMDb rating of 5.5/10). This is presumably due to the high abundance of Black Comedy.
• Mom's Night Out has a 17% critic rating and a 91% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
• Darren Aronofsky's film Mother got fairly positive reviews from critics with a 68% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but audiences gave it an F on CinemaScore.
• Never Rarely Sometimes Always was one of the most praised films of 2020, having a 99% rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. The score from Rotten Tomatoes users is much lower at 20%, thanks to pro-lifers.
• The original Night of the Living Dead. Seriously. Initial reaction by the critics was mixed to negative, while horror fans thought it was groundbreaking (but even some of them were shocked by it). A decade later it was Vindicated by History. Roger Ebert tried to explain the critical dissonance, saying, "I don't think the audience really knew what hit them." His review mentions that he saw the movie at what was a typical location for horror movies of the time (read: monster movies with Special Effect Failure) — a kiddie theater.
• Noah received very good reviews from critics (a 77% on Rotten Tomatoes), but earned a much more lackluster response from the audience, despite it being a financial success (it made around $359 million worldwide on a $125 million budget, but a very low 44% on RT and a 6.1 on IMDb). It's hard to tell if it's because of its controversial changes, its source material, or its own merits as a film.
• Now You See Me was rated "Rotten" at 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, but the ‘regular' folks at CinemaScore rate it an A–.
• The Number 23 has an 8% at Rotten Tomatoes (one of the few positive reviews coming from Richard Roeper), but it made back more than double its budget and has down-the-middle audience ratings on both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb.
• October Baby received horrible reviews, sitting third on the A.V. Club's list of the worst movies of 2012 and earning a mere 22% on Rotten Tomatoes. Conservative Christian audiences ate it up, however, and the film looks set to become a Cult Classic.
• One for the Money got a whopping 2% on Rotten Tomatoes and bombed at the box office, but fans of the book series the film was based on generally enjoyed it and it did considerably better once it reached home media.
• The Other Woman received generally negative reviews from critics (23% on Rotten Tomatoes) but still did pretty well at the box office (making over $150 million worldwide against a $40 million budget) and was pretty well-received by audiences (67% on Rotten Tomatoes).
• Out Cold was panned by an 8% on Rotten Tomatoes. But the film immediately gained a small cult following, as it has an 85% user rating.
• Out of Darkness: Critics generally heaped praise on the film, but audiences were significantly more divided on it, with most criticism being directed at the central plot twist and ending.
• Critics panned Patch Adams and many people hate it (including the man it's based on), but it was successful at the box office.
• The Pirates of the Caribbean sequels have received progressively worse reviews, yet Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End are loved by most fans and received a decent 72% user score on Rotten Tomatoes. The fourth and fifth installments received much more mixed scores.
• The John Cena vehicle Playing with Fire (2019), about a group of smokejumpers who watch over three girls they rescue from a burning cabin, holds a 26% "Rotten" approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes (based on 76 reviews), with a one-star review from Wendy Ide of The Observer calling it "beyond inept". Its target audience of families, who likely watched it as they waited for the highly-anticipated Frozen II later that month, enjoyed it more, however, giving the film a 77% audience approval score from over 2,500 verified ratings with an average of 4 out of 5 stars. It even made over $69 million at the box office against its almost $30 million budget.
• The Police Academy series was always critically derided, but has always been loved by fans. Even the first film received a critical drubbing (Ebert rated the original no stars, something he almost never did).
• Power Rangers (2017) received mixed reviews from critics (47% on Rotten Tomatoes), but has an audience rating of a whopping 80%.
• Pretty Woman has a barely-fresh rating of 61% on Rotten Tomatoes, with a slightly higher audience rating. Many critics lambasted it for being an overly slick, mindless Hollywood product and for its perceived glamorization of prostitution. Nevertheless, it was a massive success at the box office, grossing $460 million worldwide on a $14 million budget.
• Pure Country, a Non-Actor Vehicle and only acting role to date for Country Music singer George Strait, was generally lambasted by critics. Most reviewers considered it a Cliché Storm with Strait's surprisingly solid acting as a leading man being its only saving grace. Country music fans were somewhat more forgiving, giving the film a 7 on IMDb and 91% approval on Rotten Tomatoes. Strait's corresponding soundtrack was also his best-selling album, producing the smash hits "Heartland" and "I Cross My Heart"; it was also his first with Record Producer Tony Brown, who would helm all of his albums until 2015.
• RAD is perhaps the king of this trope. This 1986 movie about BMX riders holds a 0% from the critics, and a 91% approval rating from the fans, on Rotten Tomatoes.
• Out of all the sequels in the Rambo movies, the best reviewed one, and favourite amongst general 70s/80s cult movie fandom, is easily First Blood - a well-made psychological thriller with anti-war, anti-authoritarian and anti-toxic-masculinity ideas. These reviewers and fans tend to view the Rambo sequels as Misaimed Fandom-induced Genre Shift towards Strictly Formula Cliché Storm, if they don't file them as Fanon Discontinuity outright (enough fans even prefer the alternate ending where Rambo Ate His Gun that this cut of the film is often screened for special events). General audiences, and hardcore fans specifically of the Rambo franchise, tend to like Rambo: First Blood Part II best, the first of the films in the series to concentrate primarily on Rambo as a cool badass capable of One-Man Army-style ass-kicking, a direction that proved lucrative enough to define later entries in have received poor critical reception, but are loved by the franchise and the character in the popular imagination. These fans tend to view First Blood as Early-Installment Weirdness and will often bring up that it's "not an action movie".
  • As of opening day, critics have largely panned Rambo: Last Blood with a 30% Rotten Tomatoes rating while viewers have given it an 85%. The main divide seems to be critics accusing the film of racism since the film's primary antagonists are Mexican cartel members, while viewers haven't noticed any sort of overt racism at all and view the antagonists as scumbags who deserve everything Rambo unleashes on them, regardless of race. Carmen also seems to have been put in specifically so not every Mexican character would be a villain.
• The Red Pill documentary by Cassie Jaye has one of the biggest splits between critics and audiences of anything to come out in the new tens. As of October 2018, it has an abysmal review rank of 29% on Rotten Tomatoes among critics... and a whopping 91% among audiences. A split of 62%.
• Every movie in the Resident Evil Film Series received negative reviews (the first two are both on Ebert's most hated movie list), but they were successful at the box office. For the most part, it seems people who enjoyed the games hated the films for being Name-Only Sequels, while people who were unfamiliar with the games could enjoy it for what it is: an over-the-top cheesy action zombie thriller.
  • With the reboot, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, critics were still unimpressed, but audiences liked the Truer to the Text approach.
• Run Hide Fight, a "Die Hard in a school shooting" action thriller, was dismissed by most critics as a tasteless Exploitation Film, and they gave it a 44% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 13 on Metacritic. The audience scores on those same websites, however, stand at 93% and 9.3 respectively. In this case, it's niche marketing at work, the film having been picked up by Ben Shapiro's website The Daily Wire after its original distributor went bankrupt, with Shapiro heavily promoting it to his conservative target audience as a film more in line with the values he supported.
• Silent Hill was mostly thrashed by critics, but it's quite well-regarded by fans of the games, who see it as one of the few legitimately good video game adaptations. While some took issue with its changes to the plot and lore of the first game (changing the cult from a pagan Religion of Evil to fundamentalist Christians, gender-flipping Harry into Rose in order to have a more traditional Haunted Heroine), the general opinion otherwise is that it got the atmosphere and visuals of the games damn near perfectly accurate, especially in comparison to the usual standards of the genre. However, fans and critics were fully aligned about its sequel, Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, in that they both agree it was garbage.
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World was a critically lauded film that nobody initially cared about outside its cult following. But it sold immensely on home video due to positive word of mouth and the slight success of the comic series it was based on.
• Scrooged: Critics hated it when it came out — it has a weak Metascore of 33 — yet audiences loved it, and today it's regarded as a Christmas classic and one of Bill Murray's best movies.
• Audiences reacted much more positively to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty than critics did.
• Seven Pounds was slammed by critics for its implausible plot as well as being grim and morose. It did well at the box office, however, and currently holds an average score of 7.6 out of 10 on IMDb.
• Many critics enjoyed Shutter Island, but did not see it as one of Martin Scorsese's best works — it holds a 69% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, it remains an audience favorite and holds an 8.1/10 on IMDB and a 4.5/5 on Amazon (for the DVD version).
• She Dies Tomorrow received a strong 84% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but a miserable 23% from audiences, most likely for its long sequences of stillness, No Ending, and opaque plot.
• Sideways received many awards nominations (including five Oscars) and was quite the critical darling in 2004, but there are 19 pages of one-star Amazon reviews slamming it for being pretentious, unfunny, and too depressing.
• Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining was so poorly received that it was nominated for two Razzies (one for Shelley Duvall for Worst Actress, the other for Kubrick for Worst Director). In a talk with Kubrick, Steven Spielberg even admitted to Kubrick that he didn't like it, though the conversation and rewatches eventually led him to improve his opinion. While its stature has greatly improved since then, coming to be regarded as one of the great horror films of the era, King still regards it as one of the worst adaptations of his work, mainly due to the liberties that Kubrick took with his story.
• Audiences and critics alike had incredibly mixed feelings towards Space Jam, but it was a financial success, and both Siskel and Ebert liked it.
• Space Jam: A New Legacy. Despite receiving worse critical reception than its predecessor; audiences seemed and fans of the first were much kinder towards it.
• The 2009 Canadian sci-fi/horror film Splice was a critical hit because it was different from most horror films. Audiences, meanwhile, got turned off by it for the same reason.
• Spring Breakers was well received by critics, with some calling it an instant Cult Classic. Audience opinions were more mixed.
• The first two Spy Kids films were liked by critics and sold well, but Robert Rodriguez fans detested them because they believed he had "sold out".
• Star Trek Into Darkness was a box-office success, got great critical reviews and one of the highest IMDb scores of the film series (7.7/10 from over 400,000 votes)… while also being hated by hardcore Trekkers, who went as far as choosing it as the worst Star Trek film. It's Popular, Now It Sucks! and They Copied It, So It Sucks! are also at hand for unpopularity.
• Star Wars:
  • The prequel trilogy received far more respect from the critics than the mainstream opinion might have you believe: Attack of the Clones scored 67% on Rotten Tomatoes and Revenge of the Sith 80% on their original releases.The Phantom Menace was initially Fresh too, but after it was re-released in 3-D in 2012, it fell down to a Rotten 55%.
  • The Last Jedi was mostly approved by critics (currently clocking in at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, and 95% among Top Critics), but the same website's audience score was unusually low (42%). The film was a box office success (though reduced from The Force Awakens) and scored well in polls of moviegoers upon opening, including an A with Cinemascore. Critics liked things about the film some fans hated, like the massive Internal Deconstruction that suddenly changes everything drastically and how Rey is portrayed, immediately mastering every technique that took a long time for Luke to do so. These fans took issue with how they saw the plotline as undermining the general narrative of the status quo. Unattached critics didn't care about such stuff and welcomed the new direction. The discrepancy was so great, Rotten Tomatoes was forced to do an investigation to prove that the low audience score wasn't the result of bots.
  • The Rise of Skywalker got the first Rotten rating since The Phantom Menace. Critics found it So Okay, It's Average due to it playing too safe with a perceived overreliance on fanservice. Although it proved a Contested Sequel, took less money and scored lower in the opening audience polls (B+ with Cinemascore), it also did not attract the same levels of online backlash for exactly the same reasons critics found it mediocre. And while some websites like IMDB and Letterboxd had viewer scores placing it below its predecessor, others like Amazon, Metacritic, Google and Rotten Tomatoes have it placed higher.
• Street Fighter was very negatively received by critics, but that didn't stop it from making serious bank during the holiday season of 1994. Today, it's a Cult Classic (albeit a very cheesy one), particularly for Raúl Juliá's performance.
• Sucker Punch started to become a Cult Classic after barely making back its budget and being criticized by many reviewers.
• Superman Returns received very strong critical reviews upon release, but it not only divided fans, it has seen increasing backlash from both viewers and critics since its release in 2006 — which continues to grow even more severe with Man of Steel and the creation of the DC Extended Universe.
• Taken: The public loved it, but critics were mostly mixed about it. Taken 2, even more so: reviewers hated it, but it did about as financially well as its predecessor despite being much less respected.
• The 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot and its 2016 sequel Out of the Shadows were subjected to mostly negative reviews from critics, but most viewers consider the films to be So Okay, It's Average, which is par for the course when it comes to Ninja Turtles films.
• Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator Salvation, along with splitting the fanbase, also show a chasm between them and critics: the former got mixed to positive reviews but is often criticized for being an underwhelming follow-up, while the latter had critics leaning towards the negative while more defensive viewers appeared who liked the different approach and slick visuals.
• Thomas and the Magic Railroad was a box office bomb and most critics on both sides of the pond disliked it, but the few people who saw it during its original theatrical run and those who watched the home video releases did enjoy it. It was also mysteriously spared from receiving Razzie nominations.
• The Thing (1982) retroactively is this. People like it now, but most mainstream non-horror critics haven't changed their negative opinions about it, unlike, say, Blade Runner (reviewers with a fondness for The Thing from Another World in particular tend to dislike the newer version). It was slammed by critics after its release, mainly due to the gore and a plot that was perceived as needlessly depressing. After it hit the VHS market, though, the movie gained a significant cult following and is nowadays considered one of the greatest sci-fi horror films of all time. One popular theory for the dissonance says it was due to being released so close to the decidedly more family-friendly E.T. and the unfriendly aliens put a lot of critics off.
• A Thousand Words was especially hated by critics, gaining a 0% from them on Rotten Tomatoes, largely for being a extreme case of Unintentional Period Piece (it was filmed in 2008 and wasn't released till four years later), but audiences gave it a 47% on the same site and a 5.9 on IMDb.
• Tora! Tora! Tora! was hated by critics and scored a 55% rating from them on Rotten Tomatoes, but the film was nominated for five Academy Awards, and won one for Visual Effects, and is considered a classic by many.
• Chris Farley and David Spade's works together, Tommy Boy and Black Sheep, were both poorly received by critics (the former made Ebert's "Most Hated Films" list, and Siskel said the latter was one of only three movies he'd ever walked out on in 26 years of reviewing), but they were well-received by audiences.
• Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Although at the time of its premiere critics were divided (receiving both boos and standing ovations at Cannes), it went on to achieve an 85% at Rotten Tomatoes. Moviegoers hated it, and it has been known that certain cinemas have received complains of people asking for a refund. It's no help that the film may be either the most beautiful examination of life or be truly incomprehensible.
• The Unbelievers, a "documentary film" chronicling atheists Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss as they visited various parts of the world ridiculing/deconverting believers, was heavily panned by critics (both religious and secular) for being overly preachy and unapologetic about forcing people not to believe in religion, but has comparably high user review averages on sites like Metacritic and IMDb. It helps that the film was seen mostly just by hardcore atheists who were already big fans of Dawkins and/or Krauss.
• Angelina Jolie's 2014 World War II biopic Unbroken scored a 51% on the Tomatometer and a 59% on Metacritic. However, the Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes clocks in at 70%, and the audience reviews on Metacritic are overwhelmingly positive. Most critic reviews praised the actors, especially Jack O'Connell, but were all too aware of the fact that it was heavy-handed Oscar Bait and strongly criticized Angelina Jolie for taking too long to tell the story, focusing on the Oscar potential rather than the film, and drawing too many parallels between Zamperini and Jesus Christ.
• The Underworld series all got mediocre-to-negative reviews from critics, but many entries were box-office hits and audience reviews were much more favorable.
• Vaincre ou Mourir: Judging by scores on Allociné (the closest thing France has to Rotten Tomatoes), the film has been largely panned by critics (a great deal of this has to do with the very politically charged nature of the film and what's perceived as historical revisionism in it, with the left-leaning press being the most condemning at that), and audience scores are much more positive.
• Vampire Academy got a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but the fans of the book liked it just fine, or even loved it.
• Venom met a, well, venomous reaction from critics, who praised Tom Hardy's performance but dismissed the rest of the film as a throwback to '90s/'00s comic book movies in the worst way. Audiences, on the other hand, loved it, especially those who weren't fans of the comic going in, and it proceeded to set box-office records for an October release. While its critics score on Rotten Tomatoes is only 28%, its audience score is a staggering 86%. Fans of the comic book character were somewhere in between; while many criticized the PG-13 rating and severe Adaptation Decay (namely the lack of Spider-Man, who is integral to Venom's origin in the comics), they still generally thought it was decent rather than the disaster they had feared going by the trailers.
• Critics panned Warcraft, largly for being a Cliché Storm and being too alien to those unfamiliar to the games, but audience reviews have ranged from positive to So Okay, It's Average. Its Metacritic score is 32% from critics and 8.3/10 from viewers.
• We're All Going to the World's Fair was a hit with critics for its haunting and inventive presentation, earning a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, even RT calls it "narratively challenging," with the plot progressing very slowly and ambiguously. Mainstream audiences largely rejected it, giving it only a 25% score.
• Critics were mixed towards We're the Millers, some outright hating the film, but it was a financial success and scored better with audiences.
• Critics had mixed or polarizing reviews for The Whale, with a relatively modest 65% on Rotten Tomatoes and 6.0 on Metacritic, although praise was given to the performances of Brendan Fraser and Hong Chau. However, audiences were highly positive towards it, with a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, 7.5 on Metacritic, and a 7.8 on IMDb. Rather ironic, considering the director's previous film had opposite reactions (critics liked it, but audiences hated it).
• Where the Crawdads Sing did not impress critics who found it tonally inconsistent trying to go between drama, romance and murder mystery, but viewers, many of whom were fans of the book, ate it up, shown by highly contrasting scores (RT: 38% critics, 96% audiences) and earning over $100 million worldwide.
• Wiener-Dog is the usual case for this trope, scoring a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes but a 42% from users. It is a Todd Solondz film, after all. What makes this example notable is that its Amazon rating is at 1.5/5 stars, the main or even sole reasoning behind it being that the main dog gets run over at the end.
• Wild Hogs has a whopping 14% average based on over 100 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Despite that, the audience score is 72%, and it returned over quadruple its budget in the box office.
• It may be hard to believe, but there was a time when many professional critics didn't take Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, every Stanley Kubrick film, and Psycho seriously even though they were popular from the start. They have thankfully all been Vindicated by History.

Film Criticism

There have been at least two points in history where critical dissonance got to such a point that it led to a paradigm shift within film criticism in general.

• The first was in the late 1960s and early '70s when a new generation of young, snarky writers like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael became the most popular new voices in film criticism. Kael in particular is worth noting because The New York Times went out and hired her as their lead critic due to her glowing review of Bonnie and Clyde, which their former lead critic Bosley Crowther had panned, in the pages of The New Yorker. Bonnie and Clyde went on to become a pop-culture phenomenon.
• The second was in the late '90s and early '00s when the Internet emerged as a media tool and the likes of Harry Knowles et al. overturned the film critics who came of age during the New Hollywood era. One major online movie site, JoBlo's Movie Emporium, got its start specifically because of a group of guys who loved Armageddon (1998) and thought that the critics were wrong about it.

Genres

• The horror genre, in general, tends to fall victim to this. Critics tend to either balk at their graphic content or write them off as ripoffs of earlier films; meanwhile, genre fans either actively enjoy such graphic content or are able to see past the genre elements and read the films properly. However, this also works in reverse as well, with some critically acclaimed horror movies dividing audiences (in terms of core horror fans), or outright putting them off.
• Within the horror genre, slasher movies especially get this treatment. Only a few undisputed classics, such as Halloween, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and A Nightmare on Elm Street — and never their sequels — get any respect from critics, and even many horror fans (especially fans of other horror subgenres) are inclined to dismiss them as nothing more than formulaic special effects showcases. This opinion was especially prevalent in The '90s when slashers were often blamed for "killing horror", and one of the biggest horror films of the decade, Scream, was a post-modern slasher that doubled as a feature-length mockery of the genre's cliches. At the same time, however, slashers wouldn't have ruled the horror genre for as long as they did if they didn't have a widespread appeal, and to this day, they have a strong cult fandom that loves them in spite of (or, in many cases, precisely because of) their scrappy, low-budget nature.
• A handful of indie films (Under the Skin, The Guest, and Night Moves, to name a few) have attracted critical praise yet are often met with lukewarm to negative responses from audiences. Reasons for the divide vary from film to film, but the general idea from moviegoers in most cases is that it wasn't as great as critics made it out to be. Chances are if a Certified Fresh-Rotten Tomatoes-awarded indie movie only has a two-and-a-half to three-star rating (out of five) on Amazon, then this trope is in full effect.
• Modern indie horror films in the 2010s are often referred to as "post-horror". Such films are often darlings of critics and some of the more hardcore horror fans for how they push the boundaries of the genre — in ways that often alienate mainstream audiences expecting a conventional scary movie. Horror films from A24 often get this especially bad, as the studio gives wide releases and marketing campaigns to such offbeat horror films as The VVitch, It Comes at Night, A Ghost Story, Hereditary, The Hole in the Ground and Midsommar that would normally fly under the radar. It's practically a joke whenever A24 releases a horror film that it is going to see a massive split between critics and audiences.
• Religious films are often given mixed or negative reviews by critics, but popular with the audiences that they're catered to. For example, The Passion of the Christ was rated 49% on Rotten Tomatoes, but is the highest-grossing religious film and the highest grossing non-English language film of all time.

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