For me the first thing that comes to mind is Tales from Earthsea. I don’t think it’s excellent or anything and has plenty of problems but people act like it killed their dog. While it has its problems that have been covered extensively, I think it has a beautiful atmosphere and art.
IMO it would have been better received if it wasn’t advertised as an Earthsea adaptation and was just its own thing.
Here’s the flipside of this phenomenon:
The Little Mermaid (2023)
Absolutely awful, atrocious, lazy cinema. It had a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. When they do the whole under the sea scene, none of the sounds align with anything happening on screen. The plot was garbo. They’ve got a whole song dedicated to the cruelty of eating fish as if fish never eat any fish, and then that’s still not as bad as the fucking “scuttlebutt” song.
Wait, really? I thought it was pretty universally hated. I wonder if critics gave it good scores for fear of being lumped in with the idiots who were pissed with Ariel being played by a black woman.
The 94% is an “audience score”. The only way I can rationalize it is they used a bot network, but I’ve got no proof. Maybe just a bunch of parents who took their kids rated it highly? 10,000 of them.
Ever considered you weren’t the target demographic?
I bet tons of little kids loved the movie. It became like a frozen to them.
Let me stop you right there, 10,000 children ages 5-11 did NOT write a Rotten Tomatoes review.