10 Rotten Tomatoes Scores For 2021 Movies NOBODY Saw Coming
The MCU finally got its first Rotten movie this year.
Though critical reception is hardly the be-all and end-all of any movie, there's no denying that it matters a lot.
With Rotten Tomatoes aggregating the critics' verdict into a single numerical score which general audiences put considerable stock in, it can have a major impact on a film's box office prospects.
It's fair to say that the overwhelming majority of movies fall within the expected critical range - take one look at the trailer for a new movie and you can make a fairly educated guess for how it will be received.
But every so often a film will defy critical predictions and end up with a Tomatometer score just about nobody could've ever expected.
In some cases this might be a film most audiences had written off scoring shockingly positive reviews, while in others it's an expected slam-dunk ending up with mixed or even predominantly negative notices from critics.
It's safe to say that nobody saw the reception to these 10 movies coming, each serving as a reminder that marketing doesn't always give an accurate impression, whether good or bad, of a movie's quality...
10. Zack Snyder's Justice League (71%)
As much as fans were thrilled to see Zack Snyder finally being given the opportunity to complete the original vision for his Justice League - which was unceremoniously chopped up and substantially re-shot by Joss Whedon at Warner Bros.' request - would it have surprised anyone if the Snyder Cut was a total mess?
It hardly seemed like doubling the runtime was going to endear critics to this new version, and given the wildly apathetic critical response to the 2017 Whedon-helmed release - a tepid 40% on the Tomatometer - the most realistic outcome was surely an incremental improvement at best.
A shock it was, then, when the Snyder Cut near-doubled the critical approval of the Whedon Cut, landing a respectable 71%.
Though it was indeed an overlong, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink exercise in fan service and featured some frankly godawful CGI, it at least felt like a film synthesised from an artist's vision rather than a hollow, committee-assembled mess.
The only thing stranger than the Snyder Cut going down well with critics? Snyder's second release in 2021, Army of the Dead, was also broadly praised, giving the wildly divisive filmmaker two critically Fresh films in a single year. Nobody saw that coming.