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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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I think it's quite common for audiences to rate movies higher than critics. It seems to happen a lot for sequels and remakes, where dedicated fans will go out and watch it even though critics pan the sequel for not being sufficiently innovative.

This could certainly explain some of the discrepancy, but 94% (that's the score I see right now on the site, with 100,000+ verified users) is a ridiculously high score that beggars belief. As the comment to which you're replying states, that's significantly higher than the score of the original which is almost universally considered a masterpiece and a classic.

In addition, I suspect there is some selection effect going on: I suspect the woke are more likely to be verified Rotten Tomato users, since it seems to involve sharing your personal data to Rotten Tomatoes or something (I honestly don't know how it works), which would probably exclude older (i.e., less woke) people and people critical of big tech (i.e. less woke). So the “verified” population probably skews heavily woke, and is not representative of the overall audience.

I'm guessing this also plays a big factor, though I doubt it explains all of it. By all accounts, this film was bad even while ignoring all woke factors, and I doubt such an overwhelming majority of verified users are people that are sufficiently woke as to give a film good scores just to send a political message.