Black Adam’s Huge Critic To Audience Score Gap Is Now Tied With ‘Venom’

While I know there’s a narrative that especially for things like big blockbuster superhero movies, you shouldn’t listen to critics and only the fans, the truth is…they’re not very split all that often. Critics, of course, have given “fresh” aggregate ratings to every single MCU movie except one, and when we do see splits, they’re maybe 10-20% different than fans in either direction, at most. Often, they’re almost the same.

Then, there are outliers. The biggest outlier that’s always cited when this issue of Rotten Tomatoes scores comes up is the gap between critic scores for Venom and its audience scores. The gap there is 50%, with critic scoring it a 30%, and fans rating it an 80%. The fans won that one, given that Venom was a big box office hit, spawned a sequel and an entire Spider-villain universe from Sony (though we did get Morbius, so who really won there?).

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Now, Black Adam is the second superhero movie ever to open up a gap that wide. At the moment, it is exactly the same spread. Critics have scored Black Adam at 40% in aggregate, while thousands of fans have rated it a 90% instead, a 50% gap. Critics are scoring it tied with Joss Whedon’s Justice League. Fans are scoring it higher than everything except Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Yeah the DCEU is weird.

Again, this really does not happen as often as fans seem to think, so when you do see a gap like that, it’s actually pretty significant. Early reports are that Black Adam is going to do well at the box office, already setting records for The Rock personally, so it may track along with Venom that way as well. It seems likely that The Rock’s promised plans to build out Black Adam, the JSA and a future rivalry/alliance with Superman may indeed come to pass if the film performs well enough.

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So what happened here? Why are critics missing the mark on this one (and having seen the film, I agree that most of them are missing the mark)? The problem with Venom was that it was dumb fun that critics were perhaps trying to judge more like a traditional MCU movie. The same thing might be said for Black Adam and its murder-happy antihero, and some of these reviews are pretty eye-rolling:

“An unpleasant, cacophonous barrage of symbols and sounds. It adds up to little more than a two-hour montage of action and comedy concepts divorced from rhythm, or comprehensibility, or real humanity. The Rock used to be fun—but this is no fun at all.”

“A paint by numbers superhero film that refuses to actually embrace the moral ambiguity of the original character. Not wildly offensive but unfortunately not particularly entertaining. Had this come out 10 years ago perhaps it wouldn’t feel so anemic.”

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“Black Adam wants to be the film that “rights” the DCEU, but it’s just another messy, shallow entry into a sloppy canon that won’t commit to real ideas.”

Like sheesh, lighten up a bit. I mean granted, I’ve hated plenty of DC superhero films in the past, but I’m really just not connecting these criticisms with what I actually saw onscreen with Black Adam, and it appears audiences are not either. For as “wrong” as subjective opinions can be, it does seem like critics were off-based with this one.

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