Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
One of the interview questions I ask all UX Researchers is to open up rottentomatoes, sort recent films by rating and then look at the movies that have the lowest critic scores. Almost always you can see the audience score for those movies is much higher than the critic scores. I then ask why this is the case.The overwhelming majority of answers involve critics being out of touch with the audience, critics being perhaps snobby, or watching movies in an elitist fashion whereas the audience just wants to sit back and relax, not think too much, just be entertained.A very small minority of UX Researchers come to the correct conclusion, which is that most professional critics have to review every single movie, whereas the audience typically only goes to see movies that they are likely to enjoy, so that one should not be surprised that the audience score will often be significantly higher than the critic score.Those researchers are typically the ones I hire.