Having worked for a short time in the movie industry (at DreamWorks Animation), I thought this was obvious. And it was certainly true for DreamWorks&#x27; movies. Even people working directly on the movies were terrible at predicting how they would perform at the box office.<p>The reason for this is simple: movie critics are self-selecting movie aficionados. Their tastes just don&#x27;t reflect the tastes of the public at large. When you aggregate critical reviews, you&#x27;re only aggregating the opinions of a tiny sample of the movie-going public, and that sample largely shares the same tastes.