CinemaScores for superhero/comic book movies

[Kahran Ramsus]

^Precisely. Cinemascore may also be meaningless but it's still more scientific than internet user scores.

Cinemascore isn't meaningless. You can usually get a good idea of what the word of mouth is going to be from it. If you look at most of those scores listed, most of the poor scores, especially those under a B had terrible legs at the box office. The Fantastic Four reboot being a perfect recent example of this.

The problem is certain people expect it to predict it with 100% accuracy, which quite frankly is never going to be attainable. Kind of like how if the weatherman correctly predicts the next day's weather 100 days in a row and then misses one, people will complain about how inaccurate he is.

In the case of Cinemascore, it is particularly the low end that we want to pay attention to. Yeah, an A probably doesn't tell us a lot, but a C- sure does.

Same with the critics. There are always going to be films that are critic proof because they have found a devoted audience (such as Transformers), but there are also many examples like Fantastic Four, where it gets completely slammed by the critics and then it grosses less than half of what it was projected at the opening weekend box office. Critics do matter, and they do influence the fortunes of most films, especially those that aren't sequels of established franchises. It is why you see Rotten Tomatoes scores in advertisements and on Blu-Ray covers. The studio marketing teams know it.

 

[kedrell]

^Well said, and I agree. Meaningless is the wrong word I guess. Unreliable I'd say is a better way of putting it. You can't for any real conclusions about WOM for a film just based on it's Cinemascore. It's merely a tool in the utility belt to be used along with other tools for attempting to determine what WOM really is. We are always looking for that Holy Grail that will tell us just how it is received and how it's fortunes are likely to play out at the box office. Unfortunately there is no Holy Grail so we have to investigate and do all the hard, time consuming leg work to try and see how things will play out and that uncertainty can be annoying at times.