The Top 7 Most Divisive Movies on Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes should be, in theory, a litmus test. In practice, it's an arena. On one side, the expert opinion, backed by movie theory doctorates and well-rehearsed disdain for anything resembling blockbusters. On the other, the general audience, with their genuine passion for movies, the ability to turn any bad trailer into a personal offense, and their unique talent to mix up taste with social justice. When these two universes collide, Rotten Tomatoes becomes a minefield of nearly offensive percentages: 91% vs 42%, 30% vs 81%, and 26% vs 83%. Each of these numbers hides a story, and nearly none of them are about cinema.

This article is not about the worst movies or the best. It's about the movies that did something very few can: make critics and general audiences seem like entirely different species from entirely different planets. Some of them did this through their merit. Others would be better left unreviewed. And at least one deserves a hug and a formal apology. We'll cover from the most civilized disputes to the bloodiest wars (in the film review industry).

Green Book (2018): The Movie that Grandpa Loves and Twitter Cancelled in the Premiere

There are 14 percentage points between the expert opinion and what the average moviegoer thinks of this movie. We started with the most civilized movie in this article. Tony Lip, a racist Italian-American bodyguard, becomes a driver for Don Shirley, a Black, educated pianist, as he goes on a tour through the South in 1962, when segregation was still heavily enforced. In the end, they learn lessons from one another. How nice. How brave. What a great movie to give the Oscar to instead of Roma and BlackKKKLansman. Thank you, Academy. It's delightful how we can always count on you to create the greatest injustices in cinema.

General audiences loved it. How could they not? This movie spoon-fed them racism in a way that's so easy to process that we can see it over Sunday dinner and not lose our appetite. An A+ on CinemaScore, US$321 million earned in tickets, and the People's Choice Award in Toronto were just some of its accomplishments. The critics, however, were more polite than excited, and for good reasons. Don Shirley's family called the movie a "symphony of lies" because they weren't consulted when the studio decided to make a whole long-feature film about their family member. Shirley wasn't a stranger to the Black community or to his family, and he apparently refused to take part in this biopic for decades. Mahershala Ali, who won an Oscar for his part, personally called the family and apologized, a rare gesture that is seldom recognized.

As if all of this wasn't controversial enough, Viggo Mortensen used a slur at a Q&A while promoting the movie, thinking it was "cute". The movie's co-writer, Nick Vallelonga, was Tony Lip's son in real life and had made a tweet supporting one of Donald Trump's racist conspiracy theories, namely, that the Muslim community celebrated 9/11. Peter Farrelly, the director, also directed "There's Something About Mary". All of this is easily verifiable, public information, just one Google search away. And still, 91% of general audiences liked this movie. Maybe they just didn't bother to look...

Mother! (2017): The Bible Allegory that Jennifer Lawrence Didn't Have to Do

There are 16 percentage points between the expert opinion (68%) and what general audiences thought about this movie (52%). But the numbers are deceiving in this case. The real story behind this Darren Aronofsky movie is on CinemaScore: F. It got an F, for failure, for famous last words, for "f$#@% you for bringing me to see this movie".

To give you some context: since CinemaScore was created, only twenty movies or so got this rating. Mother! is one of them. Other titles include The Wicker Man, by Nicolas Cage, and Killing Them Softly, by Brad Pitt.

The premise is the following: Jennifer Lawrence lives with her husband, Javier Bardem, a poet, isolated from society. A weird couple shows up at their door. Then another. And more people. Then a lot more people. Then comes the third act, which we really shouldn't rush into and is basically as if a whole church invaded your living room. All of this is a Bible allegory: Mary, God, Adam, Eve, Caim, and Abel, the end of the world. Aronofsky says that he came up with the idea for it in five days after a nearly manic episode. It's noticeable.

The marketing campaign sold this domestic psycho-thriller as a possible Oscar winner, obviously. General audiences came to the theater expecting Gone Girl and got religious delirium. In interviews, Aronofsky declared that, textually, the movie was supposed to feel like a punch. How would you get out of the theater after watching this movie and not give it an F?

In Venice, this movie was both booed and celebrated, which is what most of us felt after watching it. Critics embraced it, part of the public ran from it. And Jennifer Lawrence made the worst move in her career to try to sell a Bible allegory that even she didn't seem to understand completely. It was bold, but not much more.

Ghostbusters (2016): The First Modern Age Review Bombing, to Milo's Applause

There are 25 points between the expert opinion (74%) and what broad audiences thought of this movie (49%). The movie itself, let's be honest, is average. Four funny women try to bring back an 80s classic. Sometimes they seem to be doing it, sometimes it's clear they're failing. The problem wasn't the movie itself. It was everything around it.

The trailer became the most disliked video on YouTube at the time, before even a single human being had watched a second of the movie. Leslie Jones got racist threats and attacks on X (formerly known as Twitter) comparing her to a monkey because of a hate campaign led by Milo Yiannopoulos. His review of the movie was titled (and this is real) "Teenage Boys with Tits". Jones left the social media platform. Twitter, in turn, did the right thing for once and banned Milo permanently on July 20th, 2016. James Rolfe, aka Angry Video Game Nerd, recorded a video declaring he refused to watch or review the movie and popularized boycotting something before it even comes out. Today, this maneuver is popular in politics.

The final numbers were a net loss of around 70 million dollars, the sequel shelved, Leslie Jones traumatized, and Milo Yiannopoulos became a problem on another platform. 74% of the critics approved this movie because it wasn't terrible. 51% of broad audiences disapproved because the public, mostly, didn't want it to exist. It's all written out.

Captain Marvel (2019): The Movie That Forced Rotten Tomatoes to Change Their Rules (Literally)

There are 34 percentage points between the expert opinion (79%) and what broad audiences thought of this movie (45%). Brie Larson gave an interview in 2018 and stated, in her own words, that she didn't need a 40-year-old man to tell her what didn't work in A Wrinkle in Time. That was enough. Three weeks before this movie came out properly, its page on Rotten Tomatoes was bombarded with thousands of negative reviews from people who hadn't watched it because it hadn't come out yet. And all because in 2015 this nonsensical move was allowed on the platform.

Rotten Tomatoes surprisingly reacted accordingly. They removed their "Want to See" system and disabled comments and reviews before premieres. It was a permanent change, and it was all because of Captain Marvel. It was the first time in history that they rewrote their rules because of a few angry men. And it probably won't be the last.

The movie itself is a competent MCU hero origin story, nothing really that noteworthy. The attacks were unnecessary. Brie Larson carried on working, the movie earned US$1.12 billion in ticket sales, challenged the boycott, and proved that, ultimately, she was right.

And we can't stress enough that the two "preemptively" cancelled movies in this list were tied to giant franchises with a predominantly male cast and fanbase but featured female protagonists this time. Let's think for a second... Can it be a coincidence?

It Comes at Night (2017): Nothing Comes at Night and the Audience Was the Last to Know

There are 44 percentage points between the expert opinion (88%) and what broad audiences thought of this movie (44%). This Trey Edward Shults flick is a post-apocalyptic psychological drama about paranoia, grief, and what families do for each other when the world ends. A mysterious pandemic devastated everything. One family isolates itself in the woods. Another family finds them. Their trust is broken. The end.

It's an excellent movie. Quiet, thick, ambiguously cruel. A24, the distributor behind it, decided to sell it as supernatural horror. They gave us trailers full of jumpscares, scenes that didn't exist in the movie, apocalyptic posters, and slogans like "it comes at night". What comes? This "It" never shows up. That's the idea. The monster doesn't exist, or it only exists inside people, and that's the point. Audiences went in expecting The Witch with more blood and had to go through a thesis statement in silence.

It got a D on CinemaScore. IndieWire posted a definitive article on the case, comparing it to The Witch (which got a C- on CinemaScore because it wasn't promoted accurately either), and A24 supposedly learned their lesson. Supposedly. What this case proves is that sometimes audiences aren't wrong, the deceiving marketing is. In other words, if you say you're selling lemonade and you give out green tea without sugar, lemon will get a bad reputation.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017): I'm Going to Die on This Hill and Dig My Grave on It

There are 49 percentage points between the expert opinion (91%) and what broad audiences thought of this movie (42%). I must admit I am in no way, shape, or form unbiased when it comes to this movie. The Last Jedi, I believe, is the best movie in the Star Wars sequel trilogy and perhaps the bravest in the entire saga since Empire Strikes Back, and, no, that is not up for debate. Rian Johnson was handed an empty myth, a Luke Skywalker that had to be more than just a statue, and a narrative that was biting its own tail for three trilogies, and he asked us tough questions: what if the hero fails? What if the past needs to be destroyed to open space for something new to grow? What if the Force is not just tied to a last name?

The loudest fan base went crazy. This is not my Luke, they cried, as if that was a proper argument. In 2018, a user going by “Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys” admitted that they used bots to rig Rotten Tomatoes' rating of the movie. Kelly Marie Tran, the actress who played Rose Tico, struggled with systematic harassment, racism, and sexism for months, deleted all her Instagram posts in June 2018, and wrote an essay in the New York Times called "I Won’t Be Marginalized by Online Harassment". Rose Tico's page on Wookiepedia was vandalized with racist slurs. The fan base didn't hate the movie. It hated that the movie proved there was space for all sorts of people in Star Wars.

And then Disney, as usual, backed off. The Rise of Skywalker basically undid The Last Jedi scene per scene, an institutional act of cowardice unparalleled in all of Hollywood. Rose Tico got 76 seconds of screentime in the sequel, a number registered by fans and confirmed by the press. And look, you can dislike the Rian Johnson sequel, you may find Holdo's arc ugly, you can hate the Canto Bight casino, you can do all of that and more. But what happened with Kelly Marie Tran wasn't just a bad review. It was something else. And that something else is stamped on that 42% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, whether you like it or not.

Bright (2017): Netflix Discovered that Critics Don't Matter, and No One Was Ever the Same After That

There are 57 percentage points between the expert opinion (26%) and what audiences thought of this movie (83%). This is the biggest difference out of all the movies in this article, and it is perhaps the greatest in the last few years. Will Smith is a human and a cop, Joel Edgerton is an Orc and a cop, and the two live in Los Angeles. There is magic. Wands. Noomi Rapace dons pointy ears and is an elf and a villain. The movie cost 90 million dollars and was released directly on Netflix in December 2017. It never saw the inside of a theater.

Critics fell hard on it. David Ehrlich, from IndieWire, called it the worst movie of 2017, which is generous considering The Emoji Movie was also released that year. The script was written by max Landis, who two years later was accused of sexual assault by multiple women. The race metaphor in the movie, with Orcs serving as a sort of fantasy-themed version of African Americans, was unanimously ripped apart for being too on the nose.

And then here's the good part, and I'm being sarcastic about it. Reed Hastings, Netflix's CEO at the time, went public and stated that movie critics don't understand mass appeal. In other words, "Our audiences loved it, we don't care about your ratings, you're fired". That was Netflix declaring, in 2017, six years ago, what would become the rule for all streaming services now. The algorithm decides what's good, engagement is the only metric that matters, and critics are but a side note. The sequel was announced and, years later, shelved, despite the public opinion. Because even Netflix is too proud to follow through on that.

The movie is bad. But overall, people loved it. Netflix liked it so much that they abandoned the sequel. The critics are still right, but powerless. Everything about modern streaming services can be explained by this paragraph, basically.

Every list like this ends with the reader yelling at the author, and this one probably won't end any differently. Did any of these seven movies deserve another fate?

Do you think one of these movies didn't deserve to be on this list? Do you defend The Last Jedi or believe Green Book was unfairly judged?

Did you see Mother! and gave it an F, or did you clap for it? And you, bold spectator that finished Bright and didn't give up on it, what did you think?

Critics read. Broad audiences read as well. And no one forgives.

Thank you for reading, and see you next time!