13 Movies That Scored A Legendary F With CinemaScore

By Simon Gallagher / September 21, 2017

There are certain easy indicators of bad movies that have handily sprung up over the years to forewarn audiences not to get their hopes up too high. A 0% rating on RottenTomatoes or a basement level score on MetaCritic are useful, and so too is the presence of the words "Nicholas Cage" anywhere on the poster. You can pretty much bet your house on those films going badly.

More subtle is the vaunted CinemaScore - a mythical-feeling badge passed out by people with clipboards standing outside of premiere night screenings - that seeks to judge a film's quality solely on what the first audiences saw. If you score highly, it's a matter for excitement (as it usually means money at the box office) - even if there have been some improbably high scores - but then a low score could merely be cast off as the emotional reactions of people who don't really know what they're talking about. It works either way.

Still, thanks to the rise in importance of the CinemaScore - certainly in terms of marketing - it has become increasingly intriguing to see which films have been the highest praised - and even better - which were absolutely hated. If only because the scorers seem very, very confident in their ability to predict things very precisely.

That band of bottom-rung movies - given an F rating for effect - is a surprisingly small one, which makes it even more interesting to see which films audiences hated on a whole other plane. It might be a hard thing to achieve, but some huge actors and expensive films have managed it...