Love And Thunder’ Sparks Debate

As reviews came rolling in yesterday for Thor: Love and Thunder, it became clear that something was somewhat amiss with the scores. While Marvel movies review much better on average than most films, Thor: Love and Thunder is currently in the bottom five of all scored MCU movies on Rotten Tomatoes with its 71% critic score, a far cry from the top five Thor Ragnarok, which has a 93%.

This sparked a familiar debate, that Rotten Tomatoes critics scores don’t matter, and we should wait for audience scores to come in instead. I hear this a lot, and I figured I should actually go through and see if that logic holds in the MCU. Do audiences and critics really disagree all that often when it comes to Marvel movies? Is Thor: Love and Thunder destined to please fans even if critics didn’t love it?

What I found may be somewhat surprising. Here are all 28 MCU movies ranked by audience score, based on the original critics list found here.

1. Spider-Man: No Way Home – 98%
2. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings – 98%
3. Spider-Man: Far From Home – 95%
4. Guardians of the Galaxy – 92%
5. Captain America: The Winter Soldier – 92%
6. Iron Man – 91%
7. Black Widow – 91%
8. Marvel’s The Avengers – 91%
9. Avengers: Infinity War – 91%
10. Avengers Endgame – 90%
11. Captain America: Civil War – 89%
12. Thor Ragnarok – 87%
13. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 – 87%
14. Spider-Man: Homecoming – 87%
15. Doctor Strange – 86%
16. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness – 85%
17. Ant-Man – 85%
18. Avengers: Age of Ultron – 82%
19. Ant-Man and the Wasp – 81%
20. Black Panther – 79%
21. Eternals – 78%
22. Iron Man 3 – 78%
23. Thor – 76%
24. Thor: The Dark World – 75%
25. Captain America: The First Avenger – 75%
26. Iron Man 2 – 71%
27. The Incredible Hulk – 70%
28. Captain Marvel – 45%

So, what’s the main takeaway here? With only one or two exceptions, the overall list looks…roughly the same as the list ranked by critics. Sure, some movies move up or down a few places, but there are only a few real outliers, and those are outliers for some pretty specific reasons.

I think it’s noteworthy that the Spider-Man movies seem to be the biggest favorites among fans, taking up two of the top three slots (those are rated high by critics too). And while Shang-Chi is a top 10 reviewed Marvel movie, a 98% audience score means people really loved more than most, it seems.

As for those outliers? I’m really only counting three of any significance:

Black Panther, the #1 critic scored movie with a 96% has a 79% audience score. I’m willing to say that at least some portion of this is due to racist review bombing at the time of release.

Captain Marvel goes from a 79% critic score to a much-lower-than-anything 45%, which was absolutely due to review bombing after star Brie Larson upset some “fans” with various comments, and this was actually the moment that Rotten Tomatoes started requiring “verification” for audience scores. I believe this allowed movies like Shang-Chi or Black Widow to escape potential racist or sexist review bombing like Black Panther and Captain Marvel before them, due to this change.

As for the notion that if critics score something low, audiences are bound to score it high, there’s only one really big outlier, and that’s Eternals, the only “Rotten” scored MCU movie by critics at a 47%, which fans gave a 78%. Not a top movie by any means, but certainly not at the bottom, either. Otherwise there just…are not many instances where audience scores are wildly higher than critic scores, so it’s hard to imagine Thor: Love and Thunder putting up some sky-high score based on the history here. I predict it could do what Multiverse of Madness did, and see a small fan bump, as that movie went from a 74% critic score to an 85% audience score.

So, in reality, critics and fans are…actually fairly aligned when it comes to the MCU, outside of a few outliers that were created by active review bombing campaigns. Otherwise, tastes are more similar than you might imagine.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.