This seemed likely to happen to some extent, but now that Captain America: Brave New World has hit theaters, we are seeing a larger-then-usual split between critic reviews and audience scores, but that has not saved many underperforming films in the past.
As it stands, Captain America: Brave New World has a 53% score from critics, making it the third worst-reviewed MCU movie ever on Rotten Tomatoes (and the worst-ever on Metacritic), but audiences are currently giving it a much higher 80%, a 27% difference.
How unusual is this? Well, let’s look at the bottom ten worst-reviewed MCU movies that I listed this week, and those splits:
- Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania – 46% critics, 81% audience, +35% audience
- Eternals – 47% critics, 77% audience – +30% audience
- Captain America: Brave New World – 53% critics, 80% audience, +27% audience
- The Marvels – 62% critics, 80% audience, +18% audience
- Thor: Love and Thunder – 63% critics, 76% audience, +13% audience
- Thor: The Dark World – 67% critics, 75% audience, +8% audience
- The Incredible Hulk – 68% critic, 69% audience, +1% audience
- Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness – 74% critics, 85% audience, +11% audience
- Iron Man 2 – 72% critics, 71% audience, -1% audience
- Avengers: Age of Ultron – 76% critics, 82% audience, +6% audience
The higher in the list you go, the more often you will start seeing critic reviews score higher than audience. Black Panther, for instance, has a 96% critic score and a 79% audience score. Captain Marvel has a 79% to 45% split (albeit that was review bombed so hard that’s when Rotten Tomatoes started making “verified” audience reviews).
But yes, as it stands, Captain America: Brave New World has the third biggest gap of MCU movies in favor of audiences, which may mean things are not quite as bad as they originally appeared. After all, it’s fans that make a movie a hit or not. However, there are two caveats here.
These are early reviews. Very early, as Thursday previews opened up last night and it’s currently 9 AM ET on Friday, the first day of the weekend. It stands to reason that viewers that rushed out to see the film this early may be predisposed to like it more than general audiences who show up later, so that score may drop.
Secondly, you may see those films at the bottom with big audience splits and they…still did not do well in theaters. That would be Quantumania, Eternals and The Marvels, at the very least, the three biggest gaps. All dramatically underperformed for Marvel and even if audiences liked the films more than critics, it didn’t solve the problems with overall attendance.
My gut tells me that Captain America: Brave New World will outperform many of these lower-ranked films, but still not be a hit at the level Marvel wants and not reach the highs of the movies it tries to emulate like Captain America: Winter Soldier. We’ll see how things go after this weekend.
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