Critics became a huge problem with this too. I'm not gonna say all critics are bad or they don't often make a good point but they are trying to play into these "stan wars" by taking sides or saying outrageous things in their reviews to garner more clicks.
This happened recently with Venom. Sony still owns Spider-Man in part but to the point they own Venom and made the movie on their own. Critics wanted it to fail. They pushed a narrative that it's "worse than Catwoman" which was outrageous. Anyone who says shyt like that is just out for clicks and cannot be taken seriously on any level.
So then Venom made $80M opening weekend anyway. Audiences actually really liked Venom. I don't think it can be denied at this point that Venom has good word of mouth. It had a record October opening and it's looking like it will do well in its 2nd weekend too.
Critics tried to sabotage it but the audiences saw through the bullshyt.
I think the art of critique is slowly dying away. I think in the next 5-10 years no critics will have any credibility and it will be their own fault for playing this game.
See, I don't know if I totally agree with that assessment. I do agree that the art of critique is dying, and that critics play a role in all this, but not quite how you describe it.
When it comes to
Venom, having not seen it (I don't really like the character, so I was never gonna see it regardless of its quality), I can totally buy it is a bad movie. However, I think it's bad in the way something like the first
Transformers* movie is bad - that is, it's not bad in a way general audiences will not notice or care about. From what I understand, it's a pretty breezy, fun watch that has its own hokey charm despite whatever problems it has. Sometimes, audiences can appreciate that, and it causes divides between them and critics.
See where critics play into all this is not necessarily what they say but how they say it. The hyperbole with which they describe
Venom's poor qualities - calling it worse than Catwoman or the like - is them playing into an audience that prior to the movie's release really wanted to hate it.
Venom was seen as some sort of betrayal to the MCU by the fanboys, a movie that was preventing Marvel from coming in and doing Venom "the right way." You peep youtube or twitter during the movie's trailers or what have you and there were commentors actively rooting for it to fail; the idea being that Sony would have to stop making movies with Spider-Man characters and Marvel would get all the toys back if this one movie failed. Probably delusional as hell, but that's people believed.
Critics saw this going and some even participated in it. I think that by time the movie released, they smelled blood in the water and saw a chance to score some easy cred and views by writing or making videos saying the most hyperbolic and outlandish things they could think of. It's happened before; check reviews for something like
The Emoji Movie and see just how melodramatic modern criticism can get. Critics saw a chance to give their audience what they want - a public flogging of a film that the superhero movie enthusiast audience saw as a b*stardization of the character and preventing them from getting what they really deserved - and aimed to deliver. Problem is the shyt backfired the moment the movie came out and people kind of fell in love with its weirdness. So now they out here looking dumb as hell.
The role of the traditional critic is dying out. People simply do not care about reviews from your standard faceless movie writer anymore. The only good those reviews serve is feeding Rotten Tomatoes so that it will spit out a percentage they can use in their online debates. They don't even read the reviews or even understand how the tomato-meter actually works. When it comes to the opinions people actually look for and trust, if they're not looking to friends, they're turning to youtubers and twitter personalities. The people who have taken the time to cultivate parasocial "friendships" with them. Audiences trust these cats more than "critics," despite the fact that the motherfukkers are still critics. They're usually less informed and less articulate critics, but that's part of their charm. They feel like the "man on the street," even though they kind of not beyond a certain point.
Mind you, many of those same youtube personalities were also in line to shyt on
Venom. The reason they aren't getting thrown under the bus too is that "friendship" I mentioned. People trust them, feel connected to them. So even though they were just as willing to feed into the over the top hatred of the movie prior to its release and the narrative that Sony was somehow hurting Marvel by making this film, they don't get anywhere near the backlash for it other critics get.
The art of critique is dying because
everyone is doing it and 90% of us are bad at it. One of my favorite complaints about
Aquaman that I've seen about other films is how the scene with Black Manta and his goons "looks like Power Rangers." I chuckle whenever I hear it because I have to believe these people have never seen an episode of
Power Rangers in their lives.
Power Rangers and its parent show
Super Sentai, for all their goofiness, do have a specific design style and aesthetic that the people at Toei have cultivated over the last 40+ years. Every character you see in colored armor is not a Power Ranger. Power Rangers don't even
wear armor; they wear spandex. lol Yet, you hear something like that over and over again about different movies because that's how criticism works in the age of youtubers and internet personalities. People don't take the time to develop the language for analyzing and discussing film in a way that thoughtfully conveys what they're trying to say. They instead speak in buzzwords and references because that's what they're used to now, and if you're an aspiring youtuber or other internet personality, that's all you need. You don't have to actually know what you're talking about; you just have to be relatable enough and
sound like you know what you're talking about.
Another interesting recent case to look at with critics is
Titans. We all know people fukking hated
Titans when it was first revealed. The show has been nothing but a magnet for "controversy" and ill will. Everyone from the youtubers to the bloggers to your average twitter user was waiting with baited breath to hate the fukk out of this obvious abomination of television and continue the "DC is fukking awful" narratives and thinkpieces. Then....something happened. Critics got early screenings of the show and they actually liked it for the most part. When the review embargo was up on RT, it had a respectable 88%. Even the reviews that didn't like it didn't seem to mind it all that much. Only the Collider review went crazy with how much they hated it.
Faced with this, people did one of two things. They either ignored the critics and marched on looking for reasons to hate a show they hadn't seen yet (note: critic reviews only matter to some when they're saying what you want them to). The Collider review was held up by some as the definitive take, but you couldn't really keep that going in the face so many other positive reviews. The second thing haters did, the more common thing, was they simply
stopped talking about it. When faced with the possibility the show was actually probably good, or at worst just inoffensively bad, people had to face the fact that they weren't about to subscribe to DC's streaming service to watch it and they were only really there to hate something. Seeing people actually enjoying it and the show get positive buzz essentially ended the party.
Cause here's the thing about the internet, the thing that critics tried to feed into with
Venom and
The Emoji Movie: the internet loves to hate things. Look at how many blogs and youtube channels are dedicated to reviewing bad movies, games, comics, etc. Look at how many people upload 30 minute "rants" about how much they don't like "thing," but then can barely hit the 10 minute mark on videos where they talk about another "thing" they do like. It's way I don't buy it when people say things like "I'm only critiquing this because I want it to be better." That's just the kind of performative crap you have to say on the internet to placate fanboys and try to appear unbiased. The truth is people love hating on shyt. I legitmately think some people have more fun with DC movies than Marvel movies just because they don't like them. Even with Marvel movies, people liking them sometimes means they get done a disservice because if you're not into the lore and speculation, you likely aren't talking about them much past release. When people online like something, they tend to just like it and leave it. It's why a video online can have thousands of "likes" but be World War II in the comments; the haters are the ones who stick around for the conversation.
Critics trying to stay relevant feed into that stuff because it's what gets the clicks. However, at the end of the day, it's pointless because the culture continues to leave them behind.
*I say the first
Transformers only because people generally look at that as "the good one" even if they dislike the others. It's also not good, but it's clearly not bad in any way audiences care about.
I got the Pro, the One S and the switch. 
my gawwwwwwwwwwwwwwd 
