TheQuartering [11/7/2021]
Rotten Tomatoes in trouble!
This week, I’ve been covering the fact that despite Marvel’s Eternals having an A-list cast and Oscar-winning director, it’s been reviewing as the lowest scored MCU movie in history. It’s 26th out of 26 films, and a full 15% lower than previous last place, Thor: The Dark World, with its first-ever Rotten 51% score for an MCU film, joining only TV projects like Iron Fist and Inhumans in the Rotten category.
After seeing the film, all two hours and thirty seven minutes of it last night, I have to say, the critics missed on this one.
Eternals is good. Perhaps not a top MCU production of all time, but I’d easily put it in the top half of all the movies released so far, and nowhere close to being far and away the worst MCU film, the way these aggregated ratings suggest.
Critics, despite what fans may think, generally like MCU movies, which should be obvious by 11 of them scoring above a 90% and Eternals being the first Rotten score ever. But this time, I don’t think they got it right. And it seems audiences disagree with them as well.
Eternals currently has an 86% audience score compared to the 51% critic score, far and away the largest gap in that direction in the MCU history. Normally critic and audience scores are no more than 3-7% apart, one way or the other. The lone, major exception is Captain Marvel, which broke the other way, 79% to 45%, where that film was review bombed mainly because of a fanboy war being waged against Brie Larson, and it caused Rotten Tomatoes to implement a “verified” system for user reviews, where you have to prove you saw the movie to rate it.