The movies critics and audiences disagree on most on Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes runs two scores side by side, and they were never built to match. The Tomatometer tracks the share of professional reviews that are positive. The audience score tracks how registered users rated the same film. Those two groups watch for different things. On a handful of titles, the numbers pull so far apart that the gap says more than either figure alone.

The split is not random. Critics watch several films a week and tend to reward originality, structure, performance and the risk of doing something a genre has not already worn out. Moviegoers arrive with expectations attached — to a franchise, a character, a trailer, a star — and judge largely on whether the film delivered what they came for. A choice that reads as daring to someone paid to watch everything can read as a betrayal to someone who waited four years for a sequel.

That is why the movies critics and audiences disagree on most cluster into recognizable patterns. One group is franchise entries that took a swing: glowing reviews praising the departure from formula, and a fan base that revolted at the same departure. Another is the inverse — blockbusters that reviewers found incoherent or sloppy but audiences enjoyed anyway, usually because one lead performance carried the film past its script problems. A third, smaller group is ambitious, difficult filmmaking that critics admired on its own terms while general viewers found it unpleasant or deliberately alienating.

These gaps also expose the limits of treating a single percentage as a verdict. A film can hold a weak Tomatometer score and still spawn a franchise. It can collect awards nominations and still leave a crowd cold. The scores are also vulnerable to coordinated voting, which pushed Rotten Tomatoes to tighten how it verifies audience reviews.

What follows are 10 films where the distance between the two scores ran widest, in both directions, with the reasons each one landed so differently with reviewers and ticket buyers.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi carries one of the widest critic-audience divides on Rotten Tomatoes, with a Tomatometer in the low 90s against an audience score in the low 40s. Critics praised Rian Johnson's refusal to replay the saga's established beats. A large and vocal section of the fan base treated that same refusal as a betrayal.

The flashpoint was Luke Skywalker. Johnson wrote him as a disillusioned recluse hiding on Ahch-To, a man who had cut himself off from the Force after failing his nephew. Reviewers read that as a rare franchise sequel willing to complicate its own mythology. Mark Hamill said publicly that he fundamentally disagreed with the choices made about his character, which gave the objection a voice from inside the production.

Other grievances piled up. The Canto Bight subplot was widely dismissed as a detour. Admiral Holdo's lightspeed ram thrilled some viewers and struck others as a rule-break that unravels the logic of space combat across the series. Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose Tico, faced harassment severe enough that she erased her Instagram posts.

How much of the audience score reflects ordinary viewing reaction remains contested. Coordinated user-rating activity was a known problem across the site around this period, and in 2019 Rotten Tomatoes overhauled its audience system, adding verified ratings tied to confirmed ticket purchases and removing user comments on films before release.

The discontent registered commercially all the same. The Last Jedi grossed more than $1.3 billion worldwide, but Solo: A Star Wars Story opened months later to the weakest numbers in the modern series, and The Rise of Skywalker walked back several of Johnson's decisions. Lucasfilm never again handed a trilogy installment to a director with that much latitude. The film remains the sharpest version of the split running in one direction: professional reviewers rewarding a filmmaker for breaking formula while the viewers most invested in that formula refused to follow him.

Paul Feig's Ghostbusters reboot holds a Tomatometer score in the 70s against an audience score below 50, and much of the negative sentiment formed before the film opened. The hostility attached to the casting announcement rather than to anything on screen.

Sony $SONY recast the 1984 original's four leads with Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, and gave Chris Hemsworth the receptionist role. The first trailer arrived in March 2016 and became the most disliked movie trailer on YouTube at the time. That reaction landed four months ahead of the July release, which means a large share of the early audience hostility came from people responding to a two-minute promo and a cast list.

The abuse went past the film. Jones was targeted by a sustained racist harassment campaign on Twitter $TWTR after the premiere, and the platform permanently banned Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos in July 2016 for his part in directing it. Few Rotten Tomatoes gaps come with a record this traceable, connecting coordinated online activity to a depressed audience number.

Critics were measured rather than enthusiastic. Reviews tended to describe a workable comedy that ran best when McKinnon was improvising, with slack plotting and a thin villain. The result was a fresh rating without much conviction behind it, which makes the distance to the audience side read as sharper still.

Box office settled the franchise's direction. The film took in roughly $229 million worldwide against a production budget reported near $144 million, a result that did not support the sequel Sony had been developing. Those plans were shelved. The series returned five years later with Ghostbusters: Afterlife, directed by Jason Reitman, son of original director Ivan Reitman. Afterlife picked up the 1984 continuity, set its story in the family of a late Ghostbuster and brought back surviving members of the original cast — a course correction aimed at the viewers who had rejected the reboot.

Darren Aronofsky's mother! carries a critics' score in the high 60s on Rotten Tomatoes against an audience score in the low 40s, and it drew an F from CinemaScore — a grade the exit-polling firm rarely issues. Reviewers graded the allegory. Audiences graded the experience of sitting through it.

Jennifer Lawrence plays a woman restoring a remote house with her husband, a blocked poet played by Javier Bardem. Uninvited guests arrive and never quite leave. Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer turn up first, more strangers follow, and the last stretch of the film abandons conventional plot altogether for something closer to a waking nightmare.

Critics who rated it highly treated the house as a symbol rather than a setting, reading the poet as a creator figure, the visitors as humanity and Lawrence's character as the thing being used up. Aronofsky has discussed the film in both biblical and environmental terms, which gave reviewers a lens through which the escalation scanned as structure rather than noise.

The marketing offered no such lens. Paramount $PARA sold mother! with the imagery of a standard home-invasion thriller — an isolated house, a terrified woman, people at the door who should not be there. Viewers who bought that premise got an unexplained symbolic ordeal instead, and the exit polling registered the mismatch.

That places this gap in a different category from fan backlash or franchise politics. It is a distribution problem: an experimental film pushed through a wide-release studio pipeline, where people paid to analyze form respond to one thing and a Friday-night crowd responds to another. The same split shows up whenever art-house technique reaches multiplex screens on a thriller campaign.

The film underperformed theatrically against its budget. Its critical standing has aged better than its audience number, and mother! remains one of the clearest examples on this list where a low viewer score tracks frustration with the ticket purchased rather than any dispute about the filmmaking itself.

Darren Aronofsky's Noah holds a Tomatometer score in the high 70s against an audience score in the high 40s, one of the clearest critic-audience gaps for a studio release built on familiar religious material. Reviewers responded to its scale and its refusal to soften the flood story into something comforting. Many ticket buyers wanted the version they already knew.

The 2014 film casts Russell Crowe as a man convinced the Creator has ordered humanity's end, and it follows that conviction somewhere dark. Aronofsky's Noah decides the family aboard the ark must be the last people left on earth, then turns that decision on his own household. Critics treated this as the point — a story about obedience, doubt and the cost of believing you have heard a divine instruction correctly. Viewers expecting a reverent retelling of animals boarding two by two instead met a protagonist who had drifted into zealotry.

The Watchers compounded the problem. Aronofsky drew on extra-biblical tradition and rendered them as enormous fallen angels encased in rock, lumbering through the film's battle sequences. Audiences who knew only the Genesis account had no reference point for them, and the creatures read as a fantasy-film intrusion into scripture. Environmental themes running through the script drew similar objections from viewers who saw a modern argument grafted onto an ancient text.

The marketing did little to prepare anyone. Trailers sold a large-scale biblical epic rather than an austere, morally unsettled drama from the director of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan. Several countries with majority-Muslim populations banned the film over its depiction of a prophet, and Paramount $PARA added a disclaimer stating that the film took artistic license with the biblical account.

Noah still performed respectably worldwide, which suggests curiosity carried it past the negative word of mouth. The score gap remains the clearest record of how far its reception diverged.

Venom is the clearest case on this list of a film audiences rated far higher than reviewers did. Critics gave the 2018 Sony $SONY release a Tomatometer score near 30. The audience score sat above 80 — a gap of roughly 50 points on a movie that grossed more than $850 million worldwide.

Reviewers objected to the tone, which swings between body horror, superhero origin story and slapstick without settling anywhere. They also faulted the dim night-shot action sequences and the villain, Riz Ahmed's biotech executive Carlton Drake, who mostly exists to move the plot along. The script treats Eddie Brock's possession by an alien symbiote as both a horror premise and a running joke, and critics read that as indecision.

Audiences read the same quality as the point. Tom Hardy plays Brock as a disheveled wreck who argues out loud with a voice only he can hear. Hardy also voiced the symbiote, performing both halves of the argument. The lobster tank scene circulated widely online because of how absurd it is. The relationship between Brock and the creature works as a hostile-roommate comedy staged inside one body. That set the film apart from the polished, quip-forward superhero mode that dominated 2018.

The commercial outcome settled the argument in practical terms. Sony ordered Venom: Let There Be Carnage, with Andy Serkis directing and Woody Harrelson as Cletus Kasady. A third installment, Venom: The Last Dance, followed in 2024. Sony also built out a slate of Spider-Man-adjacent characters around a Spider-Man who never appears in any of them.

Venom shows that a low Tomatometer score predicts little about whether people will enjoy a film or whether a studio will keep making them. Critics were grading coherence. Ticket buyers were grading whether Hardy's performance was worth the price of admission, and enough of them decided it was to sustain a franchise across three films.

Suicide Squad carries a Tomatometer score in the mid-20s and an audience score closer to 60, one of the widest divides among DC's live-action releases. Reviews treated David Ayer's 2016 film as a studio assembly job. Audiences made it one of the year's biggest earners anyway.

The story drops a crew of incarcerated supervillains — Will Smith's Deadshot, Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn, Jai Courtney's Captain Boomerang — into a black-ops unit run by Viola Davis's Amanda Waller. Reviewers focused on the choppy editing, the lurches between gallows humor and grim action, and an underwritten supernatural threat in Cara Delevingne's Enchantress that left the team with little worth fighting. The release version followed a round of reshoots, and the tonal shifts it produced ran through much of the criticism. Jared Leto's Joker, pushed hard in the marketing campaign, turns up in only a handful of scenes after heavy trimming, and that gap between promotion and screen time became part of the film's reputation.

Ticket buyers weighed the same elements differently. Robbie's Harley Quinn brought to the big screen a character who had spent more than two decades gathering fans through animation, comics and video games, and she carried much of the goodwill. The ensemble's bickering, the saturated visual design and a soundtrack packed with licensed hits gave casual viewers something to hold onto when the plot stalled. Suicide Squad: The Album reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200, a commercial signal that ran independent of the reviews.

The film grossed more than $700 million worldwide and won the Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, which complicates any simple reading of it as a flop. Its afterlife pointed the same direction: Harley Quinn headlined Birds of Prey in 2020, and James Gunn rebooted the lineup in The Suicide Squad in 2021, with Robbie and Davis returning. The characters outlasted the reception of the movie that introduced them.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice drew a Tomatometer score in the high 20s against an audience score in the 60s, a roughly 30-point gap that made it one of the most contested blockbusters of 2016. Critics faulted the grim tone and tangled plotting. Many viewers rated it a flawed but watchable spectacle.

The structural complaints were specific. The screenplay by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer carries Bruce Wayne's grudge against Superman, Lex Luthor's manipulation of both men, visions of a future war and the arrival of Doomsday, all inside a film that also has to introduce a new Batman. The moment the two heroes stand down after realizing their mothers share the name Martha drew heavy ridicule in reviews and online.

The film's defenders pointed to an idea no superhero movie at that scale had tried: treating Superman's arrival as a destabilizing global event rather than a reassuring one, and following a frightened world as it decides what to do about him. Ben Affleck's older, scarred Batman appealed to fans who wanted a version closer to Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman, in her first live-action feature appearance, drew praise from both camps.

Box office told its own version of the split. The film passed $800 million worldwide, then fell roughly 70% in its second weekend. That kind of drop points to weak word of mouth among the people who had already bought tickets.

Warner Bros. later released the Ultimate Edition on home video, a three-hour R-rated cut that restores subplots clarifying Luthor's scheme and Clark Kent's reporting on Batman's methods. The longer version handed Zack Snyder's supporters a concrete argument — that the cut playing in theaters was not the one he assembled.

Justice League drew a Tomatometer score around 40 against an audience score near 70 — a split driven less by the film's ideas than by the condition it reached theaters in. Reviewers described a movie assembled from two directors' competing instincts. Most viewers cared more about seeing the roster finally share the screen.

Zack Snyder left the project during post-production after a death in his family, and Warner Bros. brought in Joss Whedon to oversee reshoots and rewrite portions of the script. The finished release ran about two hours, the shortest of any DC Extended Universe entry to that point, and its lighter comic register sat awkwardly against footage Snyder had already shot. Critics fixed on the seams. Effects work shifted from scene to scene, including the digital removal of Henry Cavill's mustache, which he had grown for another contracted role. Steppenwolf, the computer-generated villain, arrived with little motivation beyond conquest.

Audience goodwill ran on different fuel. Jason Momoa's Aquaman and Ezra Miller's Flash gave the ensemble a looseness the earlier DC entries had withheld, and Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman carried momentum from her solo film, released five months earlier. For fans who had sat through two grim setup movies, the team-up itself was the payoff.

This is the rare case where the competing explanations got tested. A sustained fan campaign pushed Warner Bros. to fund completion of Snyder's unfinished version, which arrived in 2021 on HBO Max as Zack Snyder's Justice League at roughly four hours. That cut drew warmer reviews and a far higher audience score than the 2017 release, which lent weight to the production-trouble reading. The underlying material was not the obstacle.

The fallout extended past the scores. Ray Fisher, who played Cyborg, publicly accused Whedon of abusive conduct during the reshoots, and WarnerMedia later said it had completed an investigation. The episode also shifted how studios weigh organized fan pressure: a hashtag campaign produced a second, expensive version of a film that already existed. Later campaigns aimed at other unreleased director's cuts have not ended the same way.

Passengers sits on a critics' score in the low 30s against an audience score in the low 60s — a roughly 30-point gap on a film with no franchise behind it and no earlier version to compare against. Reviewers rejected the premise. Many ticket buyers did not.

The 2016 film, directed by Morten Tyldum from a script by Jon Spaihts, follows the starship Avalon on a 120-year crossing to a colony world with more than 5,000 sleepers aboard. A malfunction wakes mechanical engineer Jim Preston, played by Chris Pratt, 90 years early. After a year alone with only an android bartender, played by Michael Sheen, for company, he opens the hibernation pod of a writer named Aurora Lane, played by Jennifer Lawrence, and lets her believe her own pod failed.

That decision is where the critical response turned. The objection was that the film sets up a man condemning a stranger to die on the ship for his own companionship, then steers the act toward romance instead of reckoning with it. The complaint had less to do with the darkness of the idea than with the film's reluctance to sit inside it, and with a third act that hands Jim a shot at heroism in place of accountability.

Audience response ran along different lines. Viewers tended to credit the chemistry between the leads, the stretch of near-total isolation before Aurora wakes, and the design of the Avalon itself — the curved corridors, the spinning architecture, the swimming pool that loses its gravity mid-swim. The production design and Thomas Newman's score both drew Academy Award nominations, the only Oscar recognition the film received.

The split matters because it sits outside the superhero and reboot territory where most critic-audience disagreements cluster. No fan base had a prior text to defend. The argument is narrower: whether a story's central moral problem has to be answered for everything built on top of it to hold.