The superficial oddity of The Last Jedi’s Rotten Tomatoes Score.

Jeff visualized the oddity here:

However, couple that to reports that The Last Jedi had a 220 million opening domestic (and 450 million opening worldwide), and perhaps the answer is a little clearer.  Perhaps it’s just simply the case here that the audience scores for Rotten Tomatoes aren’t as predictive as the critic scores are.  This is a surprisingly contentious take to have, in a world where ‘the wisdom of crowds’ is a thing; but perhaps Rotten Tomatoes is not getting an accurate snapshot of the people who go to movies after all. Hey, it happens.  Accurately sampling a population can be an exercise in frustration and pain.

One last thought: Bob Heinlein once noted, more or less, that if you can’t write it out as an equation then it’s an opinion, not a fact. A lot of the stuff that people confidently identify as facts are thus actually opinions. And they can change at any time.

Moe Lane

PS: I’m not saying that people who didn’t like The Last Jedi are wrong (or right, for that matter).  I will say that this movie promises to be a monster, and that you wouldn’t know it from the Rotten Tomatoes audience score.

20 thoughts on “The superficial oddity of The Last Jedi’s Rotten Tomatoes Score.”

  1. I think this Star Wars is in Cult of Jobs territory right now: a structural mess but still trendy. Raking in the big bucks is a good sign, but it’s far from the only one as those audience reviews, unlike those of critics’, are posted *after* parting from said money.

  2. I have a counter to that Heinlein quip: what is the plot, in a simple sentence, of The Last Jedi?

    3. “Get in a ship and blow things up” covers a fair bit of it.

      .

      Hopefully not too much of a spoiler.

    5. I’ll stand by what I said previously. It’s a mediocre movie. Hamill’s performance, given despite a poorly conceived character arc, is what saves a movie that isn’t any better than Justice League, on its merits.
      And the problems with the plot are central to why I rate it closer to the prequels than Episode IV & V.
      ***
      And Rian Johnson can stay far away from future Star Wars movies. I won’t waste my money on another one he’s involved in.

  3. I don’t have an opinion of my own, yet, but it could also foretell a steep drop off (well, relative to the last couple Star Wars films, anyway) in ticket sales over the theatrical run.

    1. Canthros’s theory has some weight to it, I think. If this movie does anything like the repeat box office of its predecessor, it will be because large portion of the audience decided it was worth going back a second time to figure out what was going on.

      For my part, didn’t hate it. Rolled my eyes at a few moments, made noises of law and a few others, laughed a couple times. And there were a lot of individual moments that I liked. But I’m still digesting the overall package.

  5. Look to second week numbers. If the number holds steady, then the audience score is wrong. If the numbers drop (a lot), then the audience score is accurate.

    1. Let’s take, for example, The Orville. Critics hated the show, but the audience score was through the roof at 93%. Fans waited and the ratings not only held, but increased. Turns out the audience score was, indeed, accurate.

        1. The Orville has grown on me. And it can be fun. But to say it’s not PC is a bit much. It certainly has its moments, like that sex-change episode early in the season. And it’s certainly left-of-center, in a much more modern sense than the liberalism on TOS or even TNG.

  6. What I find more instructive than RT’s audience score is Metacritic’s. Because you can sort it. I checked last night, and when you sort the reciews by helpfulness, at that point, the most helpful positivie review was the 726th most helpful review on there, and the review started being rated as unhelpful at review #721.

  7. Note that I haven’t seen the movie yet.

    I found out about this earlier today. The guy who brought it up was convinced (apparently because he read it online somewhere) that it was due to vote manipulation by right-wing Trump-supporting mouth breathers who hate minorities and women, and were down-voting it because apparently both play important roles in the new movie.

    I pointed out that the two big “We hate the black stormtrooper!” pushes before the release of the first movie both turned out to be 4chan trolling, and it made no sense that people would wait until the second movie to start protesting John Boyega’s prominence in the new series. The guy I was talking to appeared to take that under consideration, though for all I know he started pushing the “Trump supporters are responsible!” line again to the next person he spoke to about it.

  8. Asked a Star Wars FAN friend of mine that watched the movie “how was it?” his response was “it was ok”.

    1. And that’s what I’ve said about it, as a fan who made myself go to the prequels, even as I try to wipe them from memory.

  9. You know another movie that made 450 million worldwide in the opening weekend? “Batman V Superman”, let that sink in for a bit. Disney best not squander their Star Wars universe under the hubris of thinking they pulled in mega bucks they can continue to get away with problematic storylines. Audiences will sour and they could end up with another “Justice League” boondoggle on their hands if they’re not careful.

Comments are closed.