The Audience Score Is Becoming Its Own Kind of Film Criticism

Rotten Tomatoes is the clearest place to see how easily different systems become visually equivalent. The Tomatometer and Popcornmeter sit beside one another, both expressed as percentages, both wrapped in recognizable iconography, both capable of becoming part of a movie’s public identity. Certified Fresh has long functioned as a shorthand for strong critical consensus. Verified Hot now gives qualifying theatrical films a parallel badge based on audience enthusiasm. On a poster, digital ad or ticketing page, the two systems can look like competing verdicts from equally coherent groups.

But neither percentage is an average grade. The Tomatometer reflects the share of approved professional reviews that Rotten Tomatoes classifies as positive. A 90 percent Tomatometer does not mean critics collectively scored a movie 9 out of 10; it means nine out of ten qualifying reviews landed on the positive side of the site’s threshold. The Popcornmeter works differently again, using audience ratings and treating 3.5 stars or higher as positive. For eligible theatrical releases, verified audience ratings are prioritized when Rotten Tomatoes can confirm that a user purchased a ticket.

That distinction sounds technical until a movie creates a split large enough to become the story. Michael is the obvious example. More than 300 professional reviews have produced a Tomatometer in the high 30s while more than 25,000 verified audience ratings have produced a Popcornmeter in the high 90s. The first instinct is to ask which side is right. A more useful question is what each side came to the movie expecting.

Professional critics were evaluating a biographical drama about Michael Jackson, one of the most famous and complicated artists of the last century. That naturally invites questions about structure, historical selectivity, perspective, performance, tone and the ethics of telling a life story this contested. Many people buying tickets during the theatrical run were purchasing a different kind of experience. They were buying two hours of Michael Jackson’s music, recreated performances, familiar imagery and a large-screen return to a cultural figure they already cared about. Those viewers did not necessarily ignore the same problems critics saw. They may simply have weighted them differently because the movie was fulfilling a different emotional function.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie creates a similar split for another reason. Critics who object to thin storytelling, heavy dependence on preexisting iconography or a plot built around references are judging elements that matter to narrative filmmaking. A lifelong Nintendo player can watch the same sequence, hear a piece of music they have known since childhood, see Rosalina or Bowser or a visual recreation of a game environment and feel that the movie has delivered exactly what the ticket promised. That response is not automatically less serious because nostalgia is involved. It simply reveals that audience satisfaction and critical evaluation often begin from different premises.

The most useful critic-audience discrepancies are the ones that break the lazy narrative in both directions. It Ends is a perfect counterexample to the familiar “critics hate what audiences love” story. Alexander Ullom’s existential horror film has been received enthusiastically by critics and far more cautiously by audiences. That does not suddenly mean critics are the enlightened group and viewers are missing the point. The same selection problem still exists. Critics attending an unusual, formally repetitive, ambiguous horror film may be more receptive to what the film is attempting than someone who bought a Friday-night ticket expecting conventional scares, escalation and closure.

That difference in expectation matters because audience scores often function as records of delivery. The question beneath many audience reactions is not simply “Is this a good movie?” but “Did this movie give me the experience I expected when I chose it?” That distinction is especially visible in genre films, franchise entries, concert movies and star-driven releases. A Jason Statham audience can be highly specific about what it wants. A horror audience can be equally specific and much less forgiving when a film is sold as one thing and behaves like another. A comedy may receive a strong audience grade not because viewers believe it is formally accomplished, but because it made them laugh enough to justify the ticket. Those are real judgments, but they are not interchangeable with the judgments critics are paid to articulate.

The important part is not deciding which group has authority. It is understanding what the disagreement can tell us about the movie’s relationship with the people who chose to see it. Michael’s gap suggests an enormous divide between critical concerns and fan satisfaction. Mario’s gap points toward the power of familiarity and franchise recognition. It Ends suggests the opposite problem: a film whose formal ambitions may be more attractive to critics than to the broader audience entering the theater. The numbers become useful when they are read as evidence rather than verdicts.

CinemaScore makes the composition of an audience easier to understand because its method is so specific. Since 1978, the company has polled people in theaters on opening night using physical ballots. Moviegoers assign a letter grade and answer additional questions about demographics, future viewing interest and other factors. The result is the famous A+ to F grade that appears in box-office reporting by Saturday morning.

That system is useful precisely because it does not pretend to be the opinion of everyone who will ever see the film. It measures the people who cared enough to show up immediately. Those viewers are often unusually motivated. A horror sequel’s Thursday-night audience contains horror fans. A superhero movie’s first-night audience contains people who bought tickets early and may have followed production for years. A concert film can be filled with people wearing merchandise from the artist on screen. A Christian drama, anime release or long-awaited video-game adaptation can produce an opening-night crowd that is far more invested in the subject than the general public ever will be.

This does not invalidate the grade. It explains it. A CinemaScore can be thought of as a measure of whether a film satisfied the audience that wanted it first. That is valuable for studios because those viewers drive early word of mouth. If the most committed customers leave disappointed, the film may struggle to expand beyond them. If they leave thrilled, enthusiasm can carry into the weekend. The grade therefore says something very practical about a movie’s relationship with its core audience, but it is not the same kind of judgment as a review written after a press screening. The critic and the opening-night fan may have seen the same film, but they arrived with different responsibilities and different reasons for being there.

If Rotten Tomatoes turned audience response into a percentage and CinemaScore turned it into a letter, Letterboxd turned it into identity. The platform passed 30 million members globally this year after adding roughly 10 million in the previous twelve months. That kind of growth changes what Letterboxd means in film culture. It is no longer simply a diary for people who want to remember what they watched. It is a social network built around taste.

Users can log a movie, assign stars, write a review, rank a director’s filmography, track rewatches, build lists and follow friends whose opinions may matter more to them than any professional publication’s. The star rating is only one part of the experience. The language surrounding the rating is often more influential. A movie can become known as “a 4.2 on Letterboxd” before much of the general public has seen it. A one-sentence joke can receive tens of thousands of likes. An obscure older film can suddenly explode in popularity because one community begins passing it to another.

The ritual has also moved closer to the viewing experience itself. It is common now to watch people pull out phones while the credits are still rolling, not because they are bored with the film but because logging it has become part of completing it. The reaction is immediate. A rating is assigned before the memory has had time to settle. Friends’ reviews appear. The average becomes visible. The viewer’s private response enters a public ecosystem within minutes.

That speed changes the way movies accumulate reputations. Traditional criticism is built around an individual voice making an argument. Letterboxd often works in the opposite direction, with thousands of individual reactions forming a collective identity around a film. Certain movies become beloved there in ways that do not perfectly align with Rotten Tomatoes, box-office performance or awards recognition. Others become punch lines. The platform does not replace criticism, but it performs one of criticism’s oldest cultural functions: it helps decide what people watch next.

Hollywood has noticed the value of this reaction economy. Rotten Tomatoes created Verified Hot because audience enthusiasm can be marketed. A film that qualifies can place the badge beside its trailer, poster or digital campaign, turning the approval of ticket buyers into a promotional asset. The distinction matters because it acknowledges something studios have always known informally: the perception that “people love this movie” can be as valuable as the perception that critics do.

Letterboxd’s value is visible in another way. Netflix, Sony, Paramount and other major companies have reportedly explored buying the platform, with discussions placing its valuation around a quarter of a billion dollars. The appeal is not difficult to understand. Thirty million members do not simply represent traffic. They represent a constantly updating map of taste — what people watch, what they want to watch, which films they revisit, which directors they follow and which titles suddenly become culturally hot.

TikTok goes further by showing that audience response no longer requires a score at all. A movie can build momentum through edits, fancams, reaction videos, clips, memes and recommendations long before someone encounters a conventional review. Research released this year by TikTok and Cinema United argued that sustained activity on the platform correlated with stronger theatrical holds for several releases, while surveyed users reported discovering films and then looking up showtimes or buying tickets. The organizations behind the study have an obvious interest in demonstrating TikTok’s value to theatrical moviegoing, but the behavior itself is already visible in the culture.

A reputation now moves in loops. Social media generates curiosity. Curiosity generates attendance. Attendance generates ratings. Ratings become screenshots, arguments and marketing copy. Those reactions then reach the next person before they have seen the film. The audience is no longer simply responding to the movie. It is helping manufacture the conditions under which the next audience encounters it.

None of this makes professional criticism obsolete. In some ways, the rise of audience scoring makes the purpose of criticism easier to define. A score is extraordinarily efficient at compression. Michael: 38 / 97. Anyone can understand the disagreement instantly. What the numbers cannot explain is why the disagreement exists.

They cannot tell you whether critics objected to the film’s treatment of biography, whether audiences were responding primarily to musical sequences, whether one group entered with stronger emotional investment, whether marketing created different expectations, or whether both groups noticed the same flaws and simply decided those flaws mattered differently. A review can do that because a review has to show its work. The value is not that critics possess a correct answer. The value is that the reader can trace how another person arrived at a judgment and decide which parts of that reasoning matter to them.

Audience scores usually remove the path and preserve the result. Yet the result has acquired cultural power. It can recommend, warn, validate, embarrass, rescue or bury a movie. It can become evidence in arguments about whether critics are out of touch. It can turn a fanbase into a visible constituency. It can help an underseen film develop a second life or make a blockbuster seem like an event everybody else has already joined.

That is why describing these numbers as “just ratings” no longer feels sufficient. They increasingly do many of the things criticism has always done, except they do them without a single critic at the center. The judgment is assembled from thousands of people who may not know one another, may not share the same standards and may not even be answering the same question.

The most useful response to a critic-audience split, then, is not to ask which side won. It is to ask who the number actually describes. A verified ticket buyer on Rotten Tomatoes is not the same audience as a CinemaScore respondent on opening night. A Letterboxd user is participating in a different culture again. A TikTok fan who has followed a movie for months before release enters with another set of expectations. “The audience” is not one critic. It is many overlapping groups producing a collective judgment in real time.

For decades, the most visible public evaluation of a film belonged overwhelmingly to professional critics. The internet did not eliminate that system. It built another one beside it — faster, larger, messier and increasingly influential.