by Lori Twichell
I went to an early preview screening last week and genuinely enjoyed myself. The movie was fun, engaging, and exactly what it promised to be. By the time I got home and opened my phone, you would have thought I had imagined the whole thing.
The headlines were brutal. Box office projections were dire. The narrative was already written before most of the country had even bought a ticket.
And yet the audience scores told a completely different story.
Two Scores, Two Realities
As of Monday morning, March 20th, the critic score on Rotten Tomatoes sat at 52%. The audience score sat at 88%. That is not a small gap. That is two entirely different experiences of the same film being reported simultaneously, and only one of them was making the headlines.
This disconnect between critics and audiences is not new. Faith film audiences have navigated it for years. When a film with a faith-based angle lands poorly with critics but resonates deeply with its intended audience, those communities have learned to read the scores differently. They know which number to trust. They mobilize around it. They go anyway, and often in bigger numbers precisely because they feel their taste is being dismissed.
But what happens when you see that same disconnect show up on a mainstream tentpole release? A studio film with a franchise attached, a built-in audience, and a marketing budget? That is a different and more complicated situation entirely.
The Circular Problem
Here is where it gets interesting from an industry perspective. Negative headlines about a film’s opening weekend do not just report the story. They become part of it.
A potential moviegoer sees a headline declaring a film’s box office performance disappointing before the second official day of release has ended. They decide not to go. That decision, multiplied across thousands of people who might have gone, then confirms the disappointing numbers the headline predicted. The media outlet did not just cover the story. It helped write the ending.
This is the self-fulfilling prophecy problem in entertainment journalism, and it is one of the least examined dynamics in the industry. The question of whether a film succeeds is increasingly tangled up with the question of how it is covered in the first forty-eight hours. Those are not the same question, but they are being treated as if they are.
Can Fans Still Move the Needle?
I have a personal stake in this question. My career got a significant boost from participation in a fan-led campaign to save a canceled science fiction show. In that case the fans made a real and measurable impact. A revival mini-series was produced. The story got its ending. The audience won.
That was a different media landscape. The question I keep coming back to is whether that kind of fan-driven momentum is still possible when the noise level is this high. Social media has given passionate audiences a powerful voice. But it has given equally powerful amplification to the outlets and accounts that traffic in negative narratives.
Sometimes more.
The audience score sitting at 88% while the critic score sits at 52% is a signal worth paying attention to. It means real people sitting in real theaters are having a real experience that the headlines are not capturing. Whether that signal is strong enough to cut through, whether audiences will look at those numbers and decide to show up anyway, is what the coming weeks will tell us.
It is one of the more fascinating case studies in how entertainment journalism shapes, rather than simply reflects, the stories it covers. And for anyone working in film marketing or distribution, it is a dynamic worth watching very closely right now.
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