Jesse Hassenger

But he does appear in 3, so I understand the confusion! Part of me wishes they kept uncovering more and more of The Randy Tapes as the series has gone on.

I also found the trailers really underwhelming and was pleasantly surprised that the meta stuff is present and accounted for. And, for that matter, the intense stuff is cooler than it looks in the trailer, too! They did not do a great job marketing this.

Yes! Getting mad because someone likes a movie always feels so strange to me. (I mean, it’s also strange to get mad at someone for disliking a movie, but I understand the basic visceral reaction there.) There are certainly plenty of movies that some of my critic colleagues like or love that I’m absolutely baffled by, and would certainly complain about, but like, a lot of critics giving an enthusiastic pass to The Old Guard is not high on the list of things that infuriate me, ultimately.

Explaining very basic concepts about how box office numbers are interpreted is not moving goalposts or trolling.

Good news is, I’ve been a regular at Polygon for a couple of years now, which means, presumably, you’ve had no trouble avoiding me before and may be able to continue doing so in the future!

What about my responses fits the definition of trolling, apart from you disliking it?

You could not have less idea of how any aspect of digital publishing works (for better or worse). But, good attempt I guess?

100% agree.

Are you confusing a majority viewpoint with a grade on a test? That’s not how tests or movies work. Or, wait, "for a movie of this scale"? What does that mean? Bigger movies need to get a stronger majority of positive reviews for them to count?!

Absolute nonsense.

I treat "consensus" as a worse indicator because it has absolutely nothing quantifiable about it whatsoever!

All of the other indicators — box office, Rotten Tomatoes scores, number of DVDs sold, whatever — are deeply imperfect, to be sure. But there’s nothing remotely quantifiable about what you’re arguing. (I’m not even sure what you’re arguing. That technically, all movies get mixed reviews? Therefore the backlash to this one was in fact instantaneous?)

I’m using the tools available that aren’t just "well, everyone I know thinks it’s bad!"

You’re right; your way, where there is absolutely no difference between a
big hit movie and a flop, and both happen in an absolute vacuum, makes way more sense.

How many bad reviews, compared to good?

Fewer. Fewer bad reviews compared to good.

Friend, surely, surely, you have heard of the phenomenon where a movie opens very well, and then falls off really hard, attributed to poor word-of-mouth? While there can be lots of reasons for those hard drops (an unusually large percentage of interested viewers rushing out to see something as soon as possible; competition from other movies; etc.), it’s not at all uncommon to attribute a larger-than-average drop to middling-or-worse word of mouth. There have been plenty of movies that opened to as much as AOTC, and made far less money. This applies to movies I don’t like, too! I think it would be absolutely naive to argue that nobody likes the Transformers movies, even though I don’t. If people hated them, they would drop like a stone on subsequent weekends, and they generally don’t.

That’s not really what bland means.

I mean, I would argue that Rise of Skywalker was probably not as reviled by general audiences as it was by fans or some critics. It’s rare that you get a movie making $500 million in the U.S. and everyone hates it (even setting aside the extremely nebulous rhetorical concept of "everyone").

My point in bringing up Harry Potter is that box office totals are not assured. You can argue that AOTC opened to a huge amount on general Star Wars hype, and then collapsed because of poor word-of-mouth… but $300 million off an $80 million opening doesn’t really indicate that, though it was more frontloaded than Phantom Menace. You wanna talk bad faith? "This movie had an opening weekend multiplier of 3.75, but that doesn’t mean anyone liked it" is extremely bad faith!

"Back on my beat," as Carley Rae Jepsen says.