Kapow! How Batman knocked out the critics

The problem with critics, says Rob Long, is that young people don't read them

Batman vs Superman had a blockbuster opening weekend. But is it any good? (Courtesy of Warner Bros)

‘It was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen,” a prominent movie critic said to me last week. “I saw it with a crowd of reviewers and guests invited by the studio,” she said, “and I couldn’t find anyone who thought the movie was worth paying for. It’s going to fail big time.”

“The movie is tracking terribly,” an entertainment industry journalist told me over the phone last week, using the insiders’ term to describe the complicated method by which studios anticipate the success of an upcoming release. “Tracking” is a dark art, somehow blending the public’s awareness and excitement about a new movie with its critical reception to create a rough estimate of the picture’s opening weekend box-office receipts.

“Here’s what I think,” a smart talent agent said to me last week. “I think this movie is going to be a big disaster for all concerned. I think the picture is going to die at the box office worldwide and it’s going to take a few careers down with it.”

The movie they were all talking about was Batman v Superman and last weekend it managed to haul in almost $450 million (Dh1.65bn) worldwide, which makes it neither a disaster nor a failure, but, instead, one of the most successful pictures ever released. But that, clearly, is pretty much the opposite from what my three friends predicted – friends, I feel compelled to say, who are smart and insightful observers of the entertainment industry.

The polite thing to do, when your friends have been so wrong about something, is to move on and forget it. No one likes the guy who keeps reminding them of their mistakes. Part of being a successful adult, as we all know, is learning how to be graceful and forbearing when our friends blunder.

I’ve never been what you might call a “successful adult”, so early this week I called my three brilliant friends back and asked them, in a tone of voice that I hope wasn’t too irritating, how on Earth they could be so wrong.

The movie critic was philosophical. Batman v Superman, she insisted, was still a terrible movie, despite its spectacular premiere.

In the first place, she told me, there’s no rule that says that movie audiences are required to have good taste. And in the second place, her job as a critic was to make a decent effort to keep the moviegoer from wasting his or her hard-earned cash.

But at a certain point, if people insist on tossing two hours of their lives away, what can she do? Investors have a word for this kind of irrational and emotional behaviour. They call it the “animal spirits” – the feelings that overcome the investment community to create financial bubbles and catastrophic crashes. There’s no way to predict or explain the animal spirits. They just are.

The entertainment journalist relied on a technical excuse. The methodology by which a movie's success is predicted – the all-important "tracking" – clearly needed a major overhaul, I was told. There's not enough weight given to a movie's social media activity – Batman v Superman was the buzz of Twitter and Facebook for weeks before its premiere – and too much weight given to older moviegoers who don't really pick which movie to see anyway. They're older, and exhausted by life, so they tend to shrug and say, "Fine, we'll see what you want to see," when confronted by the insistent younger people in their moviegoing group. This explanation – what we might call the "technical glitch excuse" – is sort of the equivalent of what large hedge fund managers and investment bankers say when the entire financial system collapses. "Hey, don't blame us. It's the stupid algorithm!"

Surprisingly, it was my friend the talent agent who delivered the most honest and direct explanation for the nearly half-a-billion dollars that Batman v Superman raked in last weekend. "I'm an idiot, OK?" He barked at me when he finally called me back. "I don't know anything." Which wasn't strictly true, because he then went on to offer some plausible reasons why a movie that everyone thought would collapse nonetheless triumphed.

"They picked the right weekend," he said. And it's true: Batman v Superman opened on a holiday weekend in the US, and one in which no other major picture was competing for an audience.

"And boys don't read reviews," he said. Since the lion's share of the Batman v Superman audience are young men – and, it must be said, old men who sometimes act like young men – the negative critical buzz associated with the movie didn't have any effect. It's a loud, action-packed superhero movie, and that's all that a lot of young men care about. The ubiquitous marketing campaign was aimed to drive up enthusiasm from that very audience.

But my agent pal’s final explanation was the most persuasive. “Maybe,” he said, “it’s actually a good movie and we just don’t see it. Maybe we’re too jaded or inside to know a good, crowd-pleasing picture when we see one.”

He paused for a moment.

“On the other hand, if the movie collapses on its second weekend, it means we were right all along. So let’s not say that I’m stupid just yet. Let’s wait and see.”

That’s what investors call “wishful thinking”.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl