Eternals
A week ahead of release, Marvel’s Eternals is looking like a rare misstep from the MCU. With over 100 reviews in, its critical Rotten Tomatoes score has dropped to a 61%, barely above a “fresh” rating, making it the worst-reviewed MCU movie out of 26 total films.
Last time I wrote about this a few days ago, Eternals was hanging on as the third worst-reviewed MCU film with a 71%, but as I predicted, the score dropped as more reviews came in, which is almost a guarantee with the site. Now, it’s the lowest by a fairly decent margin, dropping underneath even Thor: The Dark World and The Incredible Hulk. Here’s the new bottom 10 list as it stands:
- Eternals – 61%
- Thor: The Dark World – 66%
- The Incredible Hulk – 67%
- Iron Man 2 – 72%
- Avengers: Age of Ultron – 76%
- Thor – 77%
- Iron Man 3 – 79%
- Black Widow – 79%
- Captain Marvel – 79%
- Captain America: The First Avenger – 80%
Usually Marvel movies will have several hundred reviews come in when all is said and done, and I expect that Eternals could in fact be the first “Rotten” scored MCU movie ever, a wild prospect, given its A-list cast and Oscar-winning director, Chloé Zhao. There are only two “Rotten” properties in the entire MCU period, the extremely bad Iron Fist (37%) from the Netflix era and the short-live Inhumans show (11%), easily the worst thing the MCU has ever produced. Eternals is still a ways off from either of those.
Eternals
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The pushback here is that we can’t always trust Rotten Tomatoes, and the audience score will be a better indicator of whether “real” fans judge the movie good or bad. There are some examples of critics scoring a superhero movie low and fans enjoying it more, but I’ve seen that more with “goofy fun” movies like Venom (30% critics to 81%) audience. And the general complaint about Eternals is that it’s not really fun enough.
And if you look at the MCU, the critic and audience scores rarely diverge all that much. Audience scores are generally speaking rarely more than 1-5% different from the critical score in one direction or another, unless you run into an instance where there was some politics-based controversy at play (Captain Marvel’s 79% critic score versus its 45% audience score). But for comparably “low” films we have:
Thor: The Dark World – 66% critics, 75% audience
The Incredible Hulk – 67% critics, 70% audience
Iron Man 2 – 72% critics, 71% audience
Avengers: Age of Ultron – 76% critics, 83% audience
Not a ton of divergence, as there is not near the top of the list either. I don’t see Eternals being some political flashpoint, so the data suggests there will probably not be a huge difference between the final critical score and the audience score. Nothing to suggest a Venom-level “critics didn’t appreciate it for what it was” gap, which has never happened with any MCU film, from what I can tell. The biggest gap in the entire MCU where an audience liked something significantly more than critics appears to be…Iron Fist, 31% critics versus 68% audience. Perhaps not the best illustration to prove the point (hey, season 2 was okay).
Whether this affects the box office of Eternals is unclear. It’s got a lot of big names as draws, but almost no one outside of hardcore comic fans know any of these heroes, and their somewhat goofy names have been making the rounds as internet memes the past few weeks. We’ll see how it does, but this is shaping up to be a rare miss, in relative terms, before we get Spider-Man to likely turn things around this winter.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and its audiobook, and The Earthborn Trilogy, also on audiobook.
