Eternals
Eternals may be the worst-reviewed MCU film of all time, but fans are buoying the movie to a solid box office debut and higher user scores than the critics are giving it.
What the end result has yielded is the largest split between critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes in MCU history (48% to 81%), something that truly does not happen often.
I thought I’d go through and try to find other superhero films that have been similarly divisive. Eternals is not top of the list for all superhero films, just the MCU and it’s interesting to see who else is on the list here:
- Venom: Critics – 30%, Audience – 81%, +51% Split
- Suicide Squad (2016): Critic – 26%, Audience 59%, +43% Split
- X-Men: Dark Phoenix: Critics – 22%, Audience 64%, +42% Split
- Venom: Let There Be Carnage: Critics – 59%, Audience – 84%, +35% Split
- Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice: Critics – 29%, Audience – 63%, +34% Split
- Eternals: Critics – 48%, Audience – 81%, +33% Split
- Justice League: Critics – 40%, Audience – 69%, +29% Split
- Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Critics – 71%, Audience – 94%, +23% Split
- Man of Steel: Critics – 56%, Audience – 75%, +19% Split
- Captain Marvel: Critics – 79%, Audience – 45%, -34% Split
- Black Panther: Critics – 96%, Audience 79%, -17% Split
- Spider-Man 3: Critics – 63%, Audience 51%, -12% Split
This isn’t everything, but it’s enough to form a few general impressions of when we see this happen. Venom is its own special category of perhaps critics not appreciating its goofiness, while audiences eat it up.
Venom
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There’s a lot of Snyder-based stuff here, as fans rally to support those films in scored places like this, which can even help Snyder-adjacent DC stuff like Suicide Squad.
The “reverse” situation comes up much less frequently. Captain Marvel was bombed by fans angry with Brie Larson’s comments about male critics. Black Panther maybe wasn’t “bombed” at the same level, and yet that’s a suspiciously low score in the MCU, especially for a movie so acclaimed.
The “weird outliers” in this list I’d say are Dark Phoenix, with the massive split, indicating to me that fans are just incapable of putting movies under 50% outside of very rare occasions, as I’ve never heard anyone try to make the case that Dark Phoenix is good, and then…Eternals, the only MCU film with a positive split anywhere close to this wide, and something I still can’t really parse in terms of what the disconnect was here. It’s bizarre, and requires further analysis from someone smarter than me, I guess.
In any case, it’s an interesting list to be sure, as most of the time, fans and critics are roughly on the same page when it comes to superheroes, believe it or not.
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