Quote Originally Posted by Tvtyrant View Post
And all of my friends loved Batman vs Superman, that doesn't change the general reception or whether it is a bad movie.
Except that in the case the actual fans who actually saw the movie loved it: Cinema Score found an average rating of "A" for The Last Jedi, the same rating that The Force Awakens got. That's a non-self-selected sample of people taken in the movie theater itself, ensuring the sample is taken only from people who actually saw it. People in this thread keep citing the "user" reviews on MC/RT. Those are self-selected samples, rendering them near-meaningless as a means of sampling the viewership.

Actually, RT/MC user reviews are even worse than normal self-selected samples, because they don't take their sample from people who saw the movie. Anyone can create a free account on Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic, and leave a review for any movie, whether they have seen it or not. Anyone can then create multiple RT/MC accounts and leave multiple reviews for a movie they haven't seen. A bot could create thousands of fake accounts and leave negative reviews.

Over in the video game world, there are actual documented cases in which a large number of people who have never played a game leave negative "user" reviews on Metacritic. This phenomenon results in a large discrepency between the Steam user revers and the Metacritic user reviews. Steam reviews are also self-selected, but they at least manage to take their sample only from people who have actually purchased the game and played it for at least five minutes. Metacritic can't even manage that much.


CinemaScore is far from perfect. For one thing, it only samples from people who see a movie opening weekend, who tend to be the most enthusiastic about a movie. This creates a grade inflation where an "A" is good, an "A-" or "B+" is mediocre, and a solid "B" is bad. Looking at the example you give, Batman vs Superman got a B from CInemaScore, while Justice League got a B+. All three Nolan Batman movies got A ratings, as did the 1989 Batman. The worst in the Batman franchise was the 1997 Batman and Robin, with a C+.

However, despite its flaws, Cinema Score is the only non-self-selected sample of real audience members who actually saw the movie. It may not be perfect, but all the other measurements we have of audience opinion are outright horrible.

Most importantly, CinemaScore is the only measurement of audience opinion which has a strong correlation with box office multiplier, which is what Disney cares about. They got a strong opening weekend, and a high cinema score rating. That's a strong indication that the overall box office numbers will be really high, regardless of what a self-selected sample of social media and forum users think.