10 Movies Rated Fresh On Rotten Tomatoes That Would Be Rotten If Released Today
3. Spider-Man 3
No film and its reaction quite sums up the pre-Dark Knight slump the superhero genre was in better than Spider-Man 3. It advanced the characters of the previous two films in the most basic, predictable way possible, boasted painfully obvious studio meddling intended to be fan-baiting (actually, that's a problem we still have now), and had only a casual approach to comic accuracy. And people were totally fine with that.
Sam Raimi's threequel was hurt in the immediate aftermath by comparison to his early entries, and likewise fares better given the quality of what came after, but ultimately is a pretty hackneyed film that got a free pass because comic book movies were still in their relative infancy. There was a lower bar, especially in terms of tone, and there appears to be a general sense of letting things slide on geek properties that just doesn't exist now (maybe because so many reviewers are now from the fanbase side of things).
Only one Spider-Man movie's ever slinked into a Rotten standing, and that was Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man 2, a film that (similar to The Last Stand/Apocalypse situation) shared a lot of Spider-Man 3's problems, further showing the shift and differing opinions (even if TASM2 is definitely worse).