Thor Love and Thunder
Marvel
As evaluations came rolling in yesterday for Thor: Love and Thunder, it became clear that something was rather awry with ball games. While Marvel films examine far better usually than many films, Thor: Love and Thunder is presently in the bottom 5 of all scored MCU films on Rotten Tomatoes with its 71% critic rating, a far cry from the top 5 Thor Ragnarok, which has a 93%.
This sparked a familiar dispute, that Rotten Tomatoes critics ratings don’t matter, and we ought to wait on audience ratings to come in instead. I hear this a lot, and I figured I should really go through and see if that logic keeps in the MCU. Do audiences and critics actually disagree all that frequently when it comes to Marvel films? Is Thor: Love and Thunder predestined to please fans even if critics didn’t love it?
What I found may be somewhat surprising. Here are all 28 MCU movies ranked by audience score, based on the initial critics note discovered here.
- Spider-Man: No Other Way House– 98%
- Shang-Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings– 98%
- Spider-Man: Far From Home– 95%
- Guardians of the Galaxy– 92%
- Captain America: The Winter Season Soldier– 92%
- Iron Man– 91%
- Black Widow– 91%
- Marvel’s The Avengers– 91%
- Avengers: Infinity War– 91%
- Avengers Endgame– 90%
- Captain America: Civil War– 89%
- Thor Ragnarok– 87%
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2– 87%
- Spider-Man: Homecoming– 87%
- Physician Strange– 86%
- Doctor Weird and the Multiverse of Insanity– 85%
- Ant-Man– 85%
- Avengers: Age of Ultron– 82%
- Ant-Man and the Wasp– 81%
- Black Panther– 79%
- Eternals– 78%
- Iron Guy 3– 78%
- Thor– 76%
- Thor: The Dark World– 75%
- Captain America: The First Avenger– 75%
- Iron Male 2– 71%
- The Incredible Hulk– 70%
- Captain Marvel– 45%
So, what’s the primary takeaway here? With only one or 2 exceptions, the total list looks … approximately the like the list ranked by critics. Sure, some motion pictures move up or down a few locations, but there are only a few real outliers, and those are outliers for some pretty specific reasons.
I think it’s notable that the Spider-Man films appear to be the greatest favorites amongst fans, using up 2 of the leading 3 slots (those are ranked high by critics too). And while Shang-Chi is a top 10 examined Marvel movie, a 98% audience score means people actually loved more than a lot of, it seems.
When it comes to those outliers? I’m actually just counting three of any significance:
Black Panther, the # 1 critic scored film with a 96% has a 79% audience rating. I want to state that at least some part of this is because of racist review bombing at the time of release.
Captain Marvel
Disney
Captain Marvel goes from a 79% critic score to a much-lower-than-anything 45%, which was absolutely due to examine battle after star Brie Larson distressed some “fans” with numerous remarks, and this was in fact the minute that Rotten Tomatoes began needing “confirmation” for audience scores. I think this enabled films like Shang-Chi or Black Widow to leave potential racist or sexist review battle like Black Panther and Captain Marvel prior to them, due to this modification.
As for the concept that if critics score something low, audiences are bound to score it high, there’s only one actually big outlier, which’s Eternals, the only “Rotten” scored MCU motion picture by critics at a 47%, which fans offered a 78%. Not a leading movie by any methods, however certainly not at the bottom, either. Otherwise there just … are very few instances where audience scores are hugely higher than critic scores, so it’s tough to envision Thor: Love and Thunder setting up some sky-high rating based on the history here. I predict it could do what Multiverse of Insanity did, and see a small fan bump, as that movie went from a 74% critic score to an 85% audience rating.
So, in truth, critics and fans are … actually relatively aligned when it comes to the MCU, outside of a couple of outliers that were created by active review bombing projects. Otherwise, tastes are more comparable than you might think of.
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