I've been looking forward to Suicide Squad for ages. Loved the concept and am doubly stoked after loving Batman v Superman. Don't want it changed into Deadpool-lite. Loved Deadpool, but don't want Suicide Squad to be made into an imitator.
Warner Bros. Circling David Ayer for DC Comics’ ‘Suicide Squad’
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All that's been asserted is that the goal of the reshoots is to make the movie more like the tone of the trailer. Although the report has been called into question.
Even so, ratings aggregators encourage us to put too much weight on numbers and not on the details of the reviews. When you take an extensive analysis of many attributes of a film and try to simplify it to a single number, a great deal of information is going to be lost. When you take hundreds of different review numbers and average them out to a single number, even more information is lost. Maybe it can be useful to give a general impression, but it shouldn't be given more weight than the information it stands in for.
I vastly prefer Rotten Tomatoes. The reason is what it measures is clearer. It's a binary did you like it or dislike it. Metacritic takes their scores, but that assumes two critics view four stars equally.
I don't think that's clearer at all. What if a critic's reaction to a movie is ambivalent, as most of the reactions to BvS have been? How do you reduce that to a binary? That just obscures what you need to know rather than clarifying it. Clarity comes from more information, not less.
RT may not reflect the opinion of individual critics too well, but more often than not I find that the final percentage and "consensus" is a good reflection of the quality of the movie itself. And when they give a movie a 73% or whatever, it's usually about where I would rank it as well.
How exactly that works out so well, I'm not sure, but it's the reason I still like to use it.
How exactly that works out so well, I'm not sure, but it's the reason I still like to use it.
It's the same for me. I just use that to get an idea of the overall opinion, and then if I really want to know more I'll read some of the full reviews.
Off topic. Reading this, perfectly describes my criticism of a letter grade or percentage grace in academic classes. If you don't mind I will look into this a bit and start using it in presentations on the limitations of such grading schemes.
On topic. I think Suicide Squad is going to knock it out of the ballpark. It has a great cast and relatively unknown characters so the general public is going to go into the film with fewer predispositions than for something like BvS. It is also going to most likely more closely aligned with traditional blockbuster "blow things up" fare. SS could very well be as huge for DC as Guardians was for Marvel.
^ I'm optimistic, but there's no way to judge until we se the actual movie.
Forcing every score to either 0 or 100 is a false clarity, disallowing the 99 other gradations with the important information they represent. As Christopher said, the overwhelming critical reaction has been ambivalence. RT has failed to convey this info to its users. An average of the actual scores given would be much more accurate.
They don't technically ask you to score 0 to 100, they ask you to score 1-5 with 3 being fresh. You can see the average score as well if you want to (where its score is slightly higher than metacritic's). The problem is critics view specific numbers differently (some might view a perfect score as next to impossible, another may view it as fairly common), but they both equally understand the significance of liking it more than they dislike it.
That also has the single most popular villain in all of comics (the Joker), features probably the most popular hero on the planet now (Batman), and stars comicon's #1 most cosplayed female comic character* in Harley.
The only weird part is there's really no advertising using Will Smith. I think there's a lot less risk here than Guardians in terms of character recognition. The only potential problem is whether people like the interpretation (some will love this Joker, some will not, for example). Being a good movie sometimes helps. But ask the Transformers, it's not necessary.
* There is no real data to back this up, but we all know it's true.
I haven't seen any publicity since the Bohemian Rhapsody trailer, and he was reasonably prominent in that, e.g. more prominent than Croc, Diablo or Enchantress. I think they are deliberately holding off for now. I saw Smith (promoting Concussion) on the Graham Norton show, with Ryan Reynolds promoting Deadpool, and I was thinking "ask him about suicide squad, ask him about suicide squad", but it never happened, even though it was a very obvious thing to bring up. I think the only reason SS wouldn't be mentioned is if Smith's people said "We're not talking about that yet".
Smith playing Deadshot is an intriguing proposition, and I think when the big push comes we'll be hearing about it.
Seems the character is so iconic with the mask on; I doubt Smith will be wearing the mask too often in the movie. Kinda loses the point of having a mask.