10 Movies Whose CinemaScores Make No Sense

By Ben Jessey / June 30, 2019

CinemaScore provides audience opinions about most cinematic releases. The uniqueness of the site is how they gather their scores. They don't have people upload user reviews to their site ala Rotton Tomatoes and Metacritic. Instead, they get audience members around the country to grade the film they just watched on the opening night of its release.

This process gives a rare immediate response to how an audience views certain films. Occasionally though this leads to some very odd scores that aren't shared by critics or even the majority of other viewers. Huge critically acclaimed films can get mediocre ratings whereas historically poor movies can actually do well on CinemaScore.

As children generally have differing opinions to adults about movies (Shrek Forever After has a CinemaScore of A) kids movies have mostly been avoided for this list.

They weren't needed anyway since there are enough ridiculous scores already.

10. Child's Play (2019)

CinemaScore: C+

At first glance, a C+ doesn't seem that great of a score, but horror movies generally get lower scores on CinemaScore; as shown by Hereditary's measly D+ rating.

The C+ rating is actually more than expected for this film, not because it's particularly awful but due to how CinemaScore works.

As already mentioned CinemaScore gets audience members to fill out a ballot on the film's opening night. Presumably on the first night, the theatre was filled with die-hard Chucky fans, so it's remarkable to see this movie not get a D or even an F for completely changing the franchise.

When just one change is made to a popular series, there is usually a huge outcry (remember the response to the first Aladdin trailer when the Genie wasn't shown to be blue). This movie changed almost everything about the Child's play series, including turning Chucky into a robot as well as veering more into comedy than horror. Yet it still received the same score as the revolutionary first Saw movie.