Faced with a flood of questions (read: insults), we felt compelled to tackle the big question: can critics really “kill” movies?
Why do so many people hate film criticism? When they don’t completely ignore it (and that’s honestly their right), a good portion of internet users love to explain in the comments of articles and videos, and on social media, how much they dislike critics. Why? Here’s a small sample of what we see daily online on Ecran Large:
- Criticism serves no purpose
- critics say all sorts of nonsense
- critics never like anything, and when they prove otherwise with a ton of examples, they’re lying
- critics are too harsh (“You don’t like anything, you bunch of grumps!”)
- except when they’re too nice (“We all know you’re paid to say that!”)
- critics are out of touch with the real audience
- nobody cares about critics, proof: people tell us so 1 to 35 times a week
All it takes is a few big films that crush the box office despite negative reviews (random examples: Super Mario Galaxy and Michael, huge hits in 2026) or a small Cannes Festival (“look at all those pretentious auteur films that critics swoon over while normal people would never go see a 3h45 Hungarian silent film!”), to drop a coin back into the machine.
And very often, one argument surfaces: critics would harm films and could even “kill” them, preventing them from succeeding in theaters. Can one seriously defend this idea? We discuss it in a video, to share our take on the question.
