Do Critics Hate Fun or Do Audiences Hate Nonconformity?

How do we define people who don't know how to have fun from those that do?

Photo: Disney

Every new comic book movie, it feels like we go through this old cycle all over again. The Marvel Cinematic Universe consistently gets positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, although a point ends up made on social media to single out the negative reviews to be named and shamed by fans for daring to go against the consensus. Perhaps this all started with Samuel L. Jackson having sent out hordes of Marvel fans to attack former New York Times film critic A. O. Scott for having written a negative review of The Avengers back when it came out, but unfortunately that’s not the case.

Instead it seems like that’s probably where a common misconception of film criticism had come about, where critics have been written off as people who apparently “hate fun” on the grounds that they simply wrote a negative review of a movie. It didn’t matter what A. O. Scott wrote, it didn’t matter whatever explanation he gave for his negative review, all that really mattered was a numerical value that brought down the aggregate score on Rotten Tomatoes, to have people start asking whether or not he liked fun.

This approach is one that I’ve always found very disturbing. It’s disturbing because it feels like the worst component of fan culture is what’s winning here. Seeing this had also reminded me of a video essay that my good friend Dan Simpson had made about the viciousness of fan entitlement, by starting out with the reception from fans towards the ending of Mass Effect 3. Of course, I’m friends with Dan, so I can’t help but recommend you watch it if you haven’t. I’ll link it below, because I think it’s a great essay that covers how franchise media, especially when the brand is so large, and people would eventually want their own ideas vindicated.

Admittedly, I lifted that point in which Samuel L. Jackson had sent Marvel fans out to get Scott for his negative Avengers review from a video essay by Broey Deschanel (another one of my favourite video essayists about film) in which she talks about the nature of film criticism being a dying breed, especially when major studios are prone to sending in merch with the hopes of swaying critical favour towards their side. It seems to be effective, and as covered in the same video essay, she also shouts out a fantastic article in The Guardian written by Manuela Lazić that discusses the manner by which film reviews are now being seen as publicity, so in order to ensure that they present something marketable, they invite social media influencers who are likely to show off the merch that they got in order to convince people to see the film in question.¹

But there also comes a point in which we must address head-on the way that film criticism, as a profession, ends up viewed by the general public. We’re in an era where fandom perhaps has the greatest dominance in popular culture, perhaps we’re seeing it take on new levels compared to the days when the Star Wars films had first taken the world by storm, and now we’re seeing something of a similar effect with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This soon opens up another can of worms, because it’s not the first time in which I’d written a post about how their fans seem to be sore winners, and yet that perception of themselves being on top of everything had shattered with the “rotten” classification of Eternals.

This soon brings us to Deadpool & Wolverine, the latest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’m friends with more than enough people whose tastes tend to align with my own - and compared to the average rating on Letterboxd that’s currently sitting at 3.7/5, my friends’ collective rating on the other hand sits at 2.8/5. I didn’t particularly care for either Deadpool 1 or 2, so I figured from there I never really had much compulsion to watch this one, even if Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine had been one among a handful of screen superheroes that I’d grown up watching for most of my childhood.

What does strike me though, is how people seem to react to just the slightest bit of negative buzz about the movie. Granted, it wasn’t exclusive to Deadpool & Wolverine, but it seems to be a commonality especially for superhero movies - in particular, this might have also found itself pulling some of the strongest defences since Avengers: Endgame at that (another film I liked at the time, but in retrospect, I’ve just come to believe is quite terrible).

Some of these reactions go from anger being directed at tweets from some of my own peers, in which they’ve often been accused of “hating fun.” Which I’ve also found confusing, especially when the same people whom they’ve selected had great things to say about Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters, which opened the week before - or even on a larger scale, had also raved about films like Everything Everywhere All at Once or Barbie, to a point of putting both on their own “best of the year” lists. I’ve found myself particularly confused by this labelling of “hating fun” because they dared write something negative about Deadpool & Wolverine.

It’s confusing, because it feels like a convenient strawman argument that would show a lack of willingness to properly engage with the purpose of film criticism. I also expect that if this piece were to be read by a lot of those same Marvel fans, I’m also going to have certain sections be selectively cropped out to show what’s convenient to anyone who wants to say “I missed the point of Deadpool” or anything along those lines: but ironically, they’ll end up making my point too. Which just instead brings us to a different question worth asking: do these people hate fun, or are audiences just averse to nonconformity?

In high school, I’d written a negative review of Captain America: Civil War for a personal blog that has since gone on to become Cinema from the Spectrum. It’s not a review that I find myself agreeing with now, because I don’t think my writing at the time represents what I’d fully grown into at this point in time, but I still remember some of the immediate reactions towards the review: on Facebook, I’d been flooded with angry reacts from some of my own classmates, on Twitter, I’d been met with death threats, or the weird assumption that “if this movie was in the Criterion Collection, you’d love it.”²

Aside from the rampant anti-intellectualism that’s embraced by such circles, it only circles back to how fandom exists within a bubble. There’s a set of people who have been conditioned from within only to focus on a numerical value of a score associated with a film review rather than its content, and thus a knee-jerk reaction based on a pull quote associated with a Rotten Tomatoes score will be everything that people pay attention to. Because as long as there are stans on social media that focus their attention only to something that they love to this degree, they’re only going to highlight the one aspect that they can respond to, whether it’s “Marvel good” or “Marvel bad.”

But that’s also part of the beauty of what film criticism is, right? For the opportunity to see things in film that we don’t actively look out for, hoping that there would be more to discuss after coming out of the movie so that our appreciation can be fuelled or to see things from a different set of eyes. Instead, it’s the former that people seem to want more than anything: rabid fandoms are not interested in approaching these pieces of media in a critical manner but they’re only seeking further vindication to make sure that their own bubble gets much bigger - it’s all an embrace of an authoritarian sense of conformity.

There also comes a point to which I want to combine two things noted in both these video essays that I link here. One of them being fan entitlement that ultimately results in caving in to Reddit-esque theories that simply satisfy fans rather than go anywhere particularly meaningful, and ultimately what it seems like the greater goal of fan culture is: content to be consumed and propped up without a critical lens. It’s a very disheartening position to be in, especially when these people will accuse critics of being “upper class” artsy folk who sneer at popular entertainment (which, if people were consistently raving about Barbie or Oppenheimer last year, would show that this is not true) - and the reality is that many writers, myself included, have relegated our own writing to self-published platforms whether they be here on Substack or even on Patreon in order to make ends meet financially.

Simply put, whenever I buy Blu-Rays every month, I’m always saving up from whatever I earn here to make sure that I’m able to get my most wanted titles off my wishlist. But I’ve also realized that as my collection grew bigger, especially as it continued growing with more films that I deeply love, I have to be more selective with my own viewing habits. In the same week you’ll find me writing another rave about Béla Tarr’s movies for his incredibly pessimistic outlook on the world around himself, you’ll probably also find me writing a rave for martial arts films, because those just happen to be the sorts of movies that I was raised on for most of my life.

Because I think limiting the very definition of what we can consider “fun” populist entertainment to go back to the favour of superhero films like Deadpool & Wolverine is a very dangerous mindset. It’s dangerous because it ends up creating another form of snobbery and elitism that most won’t even admit to, because they’re too busy calling out all the negative reviews or anyone who dares defy the consensus as such. Granted, I don’t think that the opposing point of view is always worthy of one’s time, especially with the cantankerous takes of Armond White drawing the ire of many. But to lump every single negative review as being deliberately contrarian won’t ever help anyone’s tastes grow as much as it will build ironically towards a very highly conservative and closed-minded way of engaging with media that favours no one but the CEOs who greenlight these projects (to fans, that will seem like a good thing as long as they get more).

It seems though, as if after Star Wars: The Last Jedi had come out, more than enough people had morphed themselves into Annie Wilkes from Misery in order to get the satisfaction that they believed they were entitled to. That’s not to say that the same thing could very well be applicable to the fans of the MCU or DCEU these days, but when people get more worked up over something as trivial as another person’s opinion and its thesis rather than the contents that build it up, perhaps that also may be where people would find their own livelihoods endangered by this fan mentality. Corporations like Disney, Warner Bros., or Sony could just as well use this to their own advantage too, supposedly to make sure the media that is released under their name can be shielded from criticism, but instead it just harms the way people perceive what an art form this whole thing comes down to.

Granted, I don’t expect that Deadpool & Wolverine is some work of “fine art” and I’m not going to approach the movie, should I eventually see it, in that same manner. But who else is to say that “fine art” can’t be fun to explore? There’s always that popular perception of critics in any field that had been shaped by the character of Anton Ego in Ratatouille, but he’s not even the film’s villain - rather instead it’s Chef Skinner, who’s trying to capitalize on the brand name of the deceased Auguste Gusteau to sell frozen foods and thus the prestige of his own name would be reduced. Instead, the lesson one could take from Ratatouille’s Anton Ego is that critics are human beings like the rest of us, but they’re especially harsh because they want the best of the best - and simply being “good” isn’t always good enough.

That shouldn’t be a point to discourage active creators from making their own films but I’ve also found that many of the best storytellers could just as easily bounce off from criticism in order to allow themselves to grow as artists. When I was making my thesis film at Sheridan College, I remember thinking to myself that I had a whole lot of fun within the moment, but even the film itself could have been a lot better than it was. I’m happy enough with the fact that I directed something, but I knew for a fact that I wasn’t ready just yet to make exactly what I wanted, and I imagine that many members of my crew would have felt the same way. Instead, I just built more ideas for what I could do based on the criticism that my peers give me, because I find it’s also what encourages us to keep moving.

So who is it that “hates fun” in this scenario? Is it really the critics that dared to write a negative review of Deadpool & Wolverine and thus, apparently threaten its Fresh certification on Rotten Tomatoes? Or is it the people who demand that every review that they see for this movie be a positive one? Maybe it could be both in some cases, but there’s also a point to which the fan entitlement must be confronted so that artists working from the resources provided by larger corporations like Disney could end up making the best film that they can that represents themselves. If the near-universal embrace of films like Everything Everywhere All at Once or Oppenheimer did show something, it’s that populist entertainment doesn’t have to come at odds with the preconceived notions of the best of the best.

At the end of this, I might as well link a great video essay written by Patrick Willems, one of my favourite YouTube video essayists, about how we can talk about film criticism. Truth be told, I really like coming back to Patrick Willems because I watch his videos and I always get the impression he really has a passion for what we’re seeing on the screen, and I think that’s the sort of enthusiasm that keeps moviegoing as fun as it is all through the years. If anything, it’s the universal love for the cinema and where it goes from our past, present, and further beyond that only makes our individual tastes in cinema so unique. And yes, it can include Deadpool & Wolverine. But maybe it also cannot. It just matters that you’re able to express that love in ways that really keep people talking about what these films do on the whole. We’re all entitled to our own opinions here, we’re neither right or wrong - but the only thing wrong would be to assume the worst just on the basis of a bad faith reading.

Or you can just find another section in this long article to get mad at, and then make some ridiculous assumption about me. Or maybe you’ll even hit me with the Keanu Reeves “I ain’t reading all that” meme. But I expect such pushback anyway, for it will make my point stronger in the long run.

1. This piece can be read here.

2. The review in question has also been published on Letterboxd. You can read it here.