We all know that what terms like "good movie" and "bad movie" are subjective. They are individual opinions that are going to be based upon personal views.
Now, "successful" and "unsuccessful" are terms that apply much better to business ventures. And main stream movies are business ventures. Very few if any people would spend ten or hundreds of millions of dollars in a movie if they did not think it would make more money than it costs.
If you wanted to get a moral message across to the public, and advertising campaign would be a much better use of the money.
Interesting tidbit:
big budget movies seem to be getting worse over time.
Not that it has much relevance to a movie that won't be released for years, but the gist of the article is that big budget movies are pretty bad. And Michael Bay movies, even though they are awful, make a lot of money.
So what this really proves is that "critics" are becoming more disconnected from the general population. And their reviews and opinions are becoming less useful to the majority of people. This can be seen because the majority of people are voting with their dollars.
The least arbitrary means of measuring if someone likes something or not is to measure how much of their money they are willing to spend on it. If critics say a movie is "bad", but a lot of people chose to spend their money on it, which group is wrong?
Maybe neither, I think it just goes to show that critics are becoming less representative of the majority. (And yes their are a lot of things that could be discussed related to how, why, value, etc of such. But I don't plan to discuss them.)
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Of course on the other hand being a good movie does not make a success. For example I think Jackson's King Kong was a better movie than Kong Skull Island, (and so did critics) but audiences? According to Rotten Tomatoes, Kong Skull Island ranks higher. Personally I enjoyed both ... but King Kong was definitely the "better" movie.
"Better" in some opinions, obviously not in others.
Jackson's King Kong was too long for audiences. When I went to see it, the cinema had an interlude half way through it. Casual audiences don't have the patience for long movies such as these, which probably explains the audience reaction to Kong Island (which is, in itself, part of a wider franchise with Godzilla these days). ....
Which is more support for my view. And, if you are going to invest 50 or 100 million dollars, would you rather have a "good" movie that loses all that money, or a "successful" movie? Because a successful movie is going to have more people who value it, even if they are not the ones that vocally share their opinions.
