YMMV / Collateral Beauty

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The film's premise involves three people hiring a trio of actors to pretend to be personifications of Love, Death and Time to help their depressed friend/business partner move on from his daughter's death and save their struggling company. It's also all played as a serious drama. A lot of people felt the premise was trite, far-fetched and glurgey at best, and at worst made three of the leads come off as manipulative and unsympathetic. The studio actually seemed to realize this, given how the trailers completely obfuscate the whole Gaslighting aspect of the story. While the movie did manage to be a financial success thanks to the overseas box office, it failed to recoup its budget domestically and was considered to have underperformed.
• Critical Dissonance: Critics hated this movie - it is sitting at 13% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences were more forgiving, with the audience reaction hanging around 64% on the same site. Critics slammed the film for being emotionally manipulative, schmaltzy and too contrived to take seriously. General audiences were less harsh, finding that while the film could be tonally-inconsistent and overly-sentimental at times, they appreciated the performances and the messages the movie was going for.
• Glurge: One of the most common criticisms for this film is that it's deliberately manipulating the audience and is obvious Oscar Bait.
• The Scrappy: Some viewers find Whit, Claire and Simon pretty unsympathetic in their attempt to gaslight Howard by digitally removing the actors from their interactions and confronting him with evidence that he's not all right to force him to go through with the sale of the company.
• Tear Jerker: Everyone in the main cast has real trauma to work through, and anyone who has been in a similar situation can empathize with them.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Some viewers feel that Whit, Claire, and Simon are unsympathetic and that therefore the time spent on resolving their problems was wasted.

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