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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9634393" data-attributes="member: 18">I think this is precisely where it gets dangerous though.People often have wildly incorrect ideas about what audiences "generally thought", because they tend to project their own ideas on to the audience.The less critically they think about the movie, the more likely they are to do this, too. This is why I suggest expert critics tend to be better at guessing the success/popularity of a movie than rando-type critics or actual randos - even if they don't like a movie, they may well know it is going to be a big hit (again, Minecraft is a great example - it's basically a 2/5 movie for a lot of people, but it's going to be a huge hit because it taps into a specific vein of meme-y youth culture).And sites like RT often don't offer great insights into audience opinions as they tend to get only "motivated" people coming to like/dislike a movie (and are also vulnerable to review bombing by people who haven't seen a movie), and aside from review bombing, positivity to a movie seems to motivate people more than negativity - it's not uncommon to see a movie get an 60-80% or even higher audience score and then be a complete flop more in like with its 20-40% critic score (the old CinemaScore grading system, which actually forced audiences to grade movies, not just motivated ones, tended to map to movie success more closely, but we still saw some movies which audiences liked flop and so on).This sort of thing is often pretty good at splitting really good critics from semi-competent ones, in that good critics will recognise this is a movie that they perhaps don't understand, and will express that, whereas worse critics will think "bad movie" and not even consider their own incomprehension.I often mock the British movie critic Barry Norman for reacting to I think one of John Woo's better films (possibly even Hard Boiled) by saying "It's almost as if the violence is choreographed, a dance" or something like that, which he seemed to intend as a critique, and my reaction was to think "What do you think a 'fight choreographer' does, Barry?", but to be fair to him, I do also recall that he at least admitted a general incomprehension of the film, and whilst he didn't like it, he did seem to allow that maybe he just wasn't getting it (indeed he was not). That's because whilst he wasn't the sharpest pencil, he was at least quite thoughtful as a critic, and operated as an actual critic, not just an opinion-man.I suspect many of the critics you watch on YouTube also operate as fairly expert critics within those genres.</blockquote>

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