James' rather crass critiquing style and tendency to give random take thats towards certain works sometimes rubs people the wrong way. While he usually takes it in stride, it does mean his hot takes often cause fandom backlash regardless.
- While Schaff disliked The Last Jedi for its tonal issues and dumb decisions in-universe, he didn't mind Luke's characterization and was fine with Rey's parentage. If anything, he felt that Luke's arc in TLJ was better than Thor's in Avengers: Endgame. Needless to say, both fans and haters of TLJ were divided. However, his opinion of TLJ was softened thanks to The Rise of Skywalker making him reevaluate it.
- He got hit by this harder in his review of Joker (2019) with many people claiming that he didn't pay attention to the movie or that he panned it just for contrarianism's sake. This is despite the fact that he liked the movie overall.
- There was also his review of Onward. Notably, even those who did not like Onward found this to be too harsh and unfair. Especially since much of his dislike boils down to him simply disliking Chris Pratt’s performance as Barley as opposed to anything to do with the film itself, with him admitting that if Pixar had gotten anyone else (aside from James Corden) to play as him, he would've liked the film a lot better (though he did criticize the story and characters too, finding both aspects to be undeveloped and wasted potential). Some also suggested that Schaff did not understand the familial love and grief that was the emotional core of the movie, but he countered that he actually did identify with the film, particularly with Ian, and just still thought it wasn't very good, though he was glad other people connected with it more strongly.
- His review claiming that How to Train Your Dragon 2 is the weakest in the trilogy, though to a somewhat lesser degree. He admits that it's still a good movie overall, and by his own standards is a great sequel, but felt that it had several smaller flaws that brought down the experience for him and made it worse than the other two movies. However, given that the movie is beloved by most fans, some of them reacted this way. They found his review petty and nitpicky or believed that he missed the point of some specific narrative and character choices.
- His opinion of the original Toy Story garnered this reaction. While he does think it's the funniest of the series, he finds it to be the most poorly-structured movie of the 4 in terms of narrative, themes, and characters (especially in comparison to its immediate follow up), and he ranked it 14th out of the first 23 Pixar films - which was lower than the controversial Toy Story 4. Given that he knew that this film's a sacred cow, he anticipated this reaction by showing that it shocked even Oscar and Mr. Sykes.Sykes: *Gasp* Did he just say?
Oscar: Aye, he did. - In his ranking of the 2000s Disney films, he considered Bolt and Treasure Planet to be mediocre films, much to the chagrin of those films' respective fans. Notably, he actually ranked Bolt one spot lower than the widely-reviled Home on the Range, and despite making a lot of jabs at Doug Walker in his other videos, ironically used the same criticism of Treasure Planet that Doug did (complaining about the mix of sci-fi and old-timey elements, not understanding what steampunk or cyberpunk is), though when he ranked them again, he later decided that Home on the Range was worse than Bolt and he liked the steampunk aesthetic of Treasure Planet. He also got a lot of fans of The Princess and the Frog upset for admitting that he hated Ray and laughed at his death, which many saw as a major Tear Jerker. Finally, he also surprised fans of Dinosaur when he ranked it dead last and deemed it not just the worst Disney film he'd ever watched but the most boring film he’d ever watched in his entire life. For this one, he actually invited people to challenge him by calling for videos defending it, and he promoted several of these on his channel.
- He didn't outright pan it (he even gave it a 7/10), but his video saying that Better Call Saul was "kinda overrated" and "not quite great" led to a lot of backlash, with a major point of contention being that he was let down by the high expectations set by other people who were praising the show, and that he was just unfairly comparing it to Breaking Bad. However, he released a follow-up video
admitting he was unfair because of the high expectations which made him overanalyze things and missing some actual good tidbits. Also, he admits that Season 6 made him appreciate the series more. - An example of him panning a character rather than a show, but his dislike for the character of John Walker in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (to the point he lowered his score in response to the showrunners' statements that Walker was meant to be a sympathetic character and he found his redemption to be one of the low points of the show) generated a lot of backlash in his review, with viewers arguing that he saw Walker from a black-and-white perspective which completely misses the nuances of his character.
- A more minor example, but Schaff occasionally throwing shade at the Dark Age Disney filmsnote (when he isn't completely ignoring their existence) has annoyed several fans, who tend to argue that the movies are more important than he gives them credit for.
- His lukewarm-to-negative review of Turning Red has received quite a bit of criticism, with many feeling that he missed the point of some of the film's themes and characters, on top of some of his points being overly nit-picky and/or absurd (such as stating that Ming Lee's strict parenting was unrealistic, which received backlash to the point that he would later acknowledge the criticisms in a pinned comment). Some also feel his comparisons of the film to similar films such as Lady Bird is not entirely fair, given the film is aimed towards a far younger audience. But Schaffrillas quickly lucked out thanks to The Mysterious Mr. Enter, whose now-infamous reviewnote would overshadow Schaffrillas' review and have people cool down on him, which he also acknowledged on Twitter. In his review of Lightyear, Schaff admits that he was too harsh in his initial review, praised the film for being able to connect with so many different people and for the "AWOOGA!" scene (which he claimed was better than the entirety of Lightyear), and bumped his initial 5/10 rating to a 6/10.
- In his ranking of Blue Sky Studios' films, he considered Rio a mediocre film, and placed the poorly-received sequel one spot higher for being more entertaining despite the weaker plot, which upset many Rio fans because they felt he didn't hate the second film enough in their eyes. This was, according to Schaff, one of the most annoying fanbases he had to deal with as he got harassed to no end because of it, despite the fact that he explicitly says in the video that the second movie was worse than the first one. It got to the point where he didn't bother putting the video back up when it was blocked for copyright, because he got that tired of the harassment he got for "liking" Rio 2, even though he thinks it's a bad movie and he doesn't like it. He then put the video back as an April Fools' Day joke with a new ending claiming that Rio 2 was the best movie he'd ever seen just to spite the aggressive Rio fans. Unsurprisingly, many Rio fans were not happy about the new ending in the video due to how spiteful it was.
- He has also referenced this incident twice in the Disney Direct-to-DVD sequel ranking; the first when he openly admits to slightly preferring Bambi II over the first one (as he views both to be So Okay, It's Average), asking if that's ok and if no Bambi II haters will go out to harass him about it; he also referred to Bolt fans as the opposite of Rio fans due to them having a much calmer reaction to him not liking the film.
- In his video essay on Spider-Man 3, he generated some backlash after calling Alfred Molina's Doc Ock a weak performance.
- Him claiming Pikmin 2 to be the weakest game in the Pikmin series due to his massive dislike of the cave system, as well as finding the story to be much less intense than in both Pikmin and Pikmin 3 got quite a bit of backlash. While not an unpopular opinion — even the team behind the series notes that there is a divide between fans of 1/3 and 2 — it nevertheless got its fair of backlash which also led to at least one video directly calling him wrong for thinking that way about it.
- Sometimes Schaff gets this from his own editors. In his video on weird musical adaptations, Schaff dismissed 1776, saying that nobody cared about it, and the editor inserted brief text complaining that she's apparently the only one who likes it. In his ranking of all the Illumination films, an editor took a moment during Schaff's Hop review to complain about Schaff's disdain for Howl's Moving Castle. This is to say nothing of Villager Boy, who constantly puts in Rock Dog references in videos to convince Schaff to like it.
- He got a lot of flak for giving The Bad Guys (2022) only 2.5 stars on Letterboxd, amplified by his initial lack of an explanation. He refused to review the film for a long time, saying that he just didn't have anything interesting to say about it, and he occasionally jokingly teased a review of the film, adding more fuel to the fire. In 2024, he said he would actually review the film if Schaff Classic (his YTP side channel) got 100,000 subscribers while proclaiming he didn't expect them to pull this off.
- Some people even feel this way about his review of Ralph Breaks the Internet, with those who liked it disagreeing with him and even some who disliked it saying that him calling it a "cinematic disaster" is an overreaction.
- James was fully expecting this reaction out of his Steven Spielberg ranking video, due to him placing three films considered cinematic classics, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jaws, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, rather low compared to the general consensus (#20, #18, and #12 respectively). While this was true to some extent, the video ended up receiving more backlash due to Ready Player One being ranked fourth-to-last at #31. Most of the aspects of the movie that James found to be Narm are rather beloved aspects by fans, which ended up not sitting well with them when James proceeded to list them out in a rather satirical manner. He also got some backlash for tearing 1941 to shreds and calling it a boringly unfunny and ham-fisted farce before placing it in the second-worst slot, as while the film is by no means regarded as one of Spielberg's masterpieces, it is a Cult Classic with a dedicated following which has reevaluated it over the years since its initial skewering by critics, leading fans of the film to be shocked that he would place it so low.
- His video on Why Cars is a Conceptually Bad Franchise got a bit of backlash from fans of the series, primarily over the perception that James completely missed many of the core aspects of the appeal of cars (the fact that it's a love letter to car enthusiasts and old Americana) and the fact that there are plot threads that actually do have a narrative purpose for the characters to be cars. A number of commenters also compared the review to that of The Unlucky Tug as a good example of a review that also takes into account these facts.
