There are some movies you'll just go and see no matter what the critics say. Maybe it's a big dumb comedy and you feel like a laugh, or there's that one actor who you'll watch no matter what. Conversely, there are some critics who can have a big influence on what you'll see, no matter what your friends say – you know their work, and trust their recommendations.
So, what are the movies that people loved, but critics hated? And what about those movies that got rave reviews but just didn't click with audiences?
To try and answer these questions I've analysed 10,000 movies from 1970 to 2013 in the Rotten Tomatoes database, and determined the difference in audience score and critic score by subtracting the former from the latter. This gives us an index of audience-critic agreement, which I've named the Tisdale-Carano index*.
From this, we can see which movies the audience loved, but the critics hated – which will be more positive, and movies the critics loved but the audience hated – more negative. We can also find out what types of movies fall into these categories – like which actors, directors and genres are most common to each.
You can read more about how I did this below, but first, here are the results.
The top movie that audiences loved but critics hated was 1986 BMX film Rad. Rad tells the story of Cru Jones, who enters and (SPOILER) wins a BMX race called Helltrack. Take a look at the Wikipedia entry for the film, and I'm sure you'll agree it sounds pretty awesome (though obviously not as good as seminal 80s flick BMX Bandits).
Scary Movie 5 topped the list for recent films, with a Tisdale-Carano index of 75. This one is pretty self-explanatory, really: audiences like big dumb comedies, and critics mostly don't.
The list of movies that the critics loved but audiences hated was topped by 1974 film Daisy Miller, a costume drama starring Cybill Shepherd. I was surprised to see Antz (-48) and Spy Kids (-54) in the top 10 most negative – I thought they were both quite popular.
Apart from critic and user ratings, I also analysed the first two actors, director, genre, and recommended audience age rating for the top 200 films from either end of the scale.
Ice Cube and Martin Lawrence were tied for the most appearances in strongly positive films, at four each, closely followed by actors such as Vin Diesel and Angelina Jolie.
At the other end of the scale we have the incomparable Jeff Bridges, who had five films in the strongly negative list – obviously something of a critical darling. His films included Winter Kills (1977), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), Stay Hungry (1976), Hearts of the West (1975), and The Morning After (2006).
As for directors, the top of the list for most positive were Joel Schumacher, Tyler Perry, and Keenen Ivory Wayans, who each had three films. Tyler Perry also starred in one of his films, Madea's Family Reunion (2006), as well as writing and directing all three.
Jonathan Demme, of Silence of the Lambs fame, had the most movies in the negative list with five.
The US age ratings reflected a younger audience for the positive films, with the largest proportion of films classified as PG-13, compared to the negative list, which was dominated by the next category up: R. This holds with Hollywood's approach to maximise the return on investment by making popular films that appeal to both younger and older viewers.
Here's the full list of movies (leave search field blank to see whole list, and click here to load the database on mobile):
Methods
I used this IMDb list of 10,000 US-released movies from 1970-2013 (though I did notice a film from 1967) to get ID numbers for a large number of movies. I then wrote a program that accesses the Rotten Tomatoes database via their API and grabbed the title, first two actors listed, genres, first director listed, studio, year of release, and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating of each movie based on the IMDb number. From this, I removed 2,828 films without a user or critic rating. This produced the dataset for analysis. I created the Tisdale-Carano index by simply subtracting the critic score from the user score, then ranking the entire dataset by this number.
Rotten Tomatoes has previously released a press release listing their own analysis of the top eight films audiences loved but critics hated with documentary Hating Breitbart at the top. This wasn't in the list I used, probably because the list only considered movies with a wide release of 500 cinemas or over. Apart from that, differences between their top 10 and my top 10 are the inclusion of older films in mine – I'm not sure what dates they considered – and Broken Bridges not being in my list – I can't account for this one, I suppose it was just left off the list I used. Also they've got an extra decimal point available, which wasn't available via their API for my data.
Ideally I'd have used a comprehensive list of films from a large time period, but I couldn't get the data from the Rotten Tomatoes API, or find such a list elsewhere.
*I initially ran a pilot of this analysis for 2012-2013 films only, and named the index after the actors on the most positive and negative films – in this case Ashley Tisdale in Scary Movie 5, and Gina Carano in Haywire.
