Captain Marvel just opened on March 8 and reactions are flying across the web. You can check social media and article and video comments, but also places that specifically tally review scores. Rotten Tomatoes gets a lot of attention (not all of it great) for its fresh/rotten Tomatometer and Audience Score from fans. But there's also the average Metascore from Metacritic, the opening night moviegoers polled by CinemaScore, and thousands of users who rate movies at IMDb.
It's simplistic to just check an outlet's grade or score on its own and think you're getting the full picture. But if you compare those scores to other movies -- and pair the scores with real reactions from people who have actually seen the movie -- you can get a general idea of what viewers thought.
So let's do that for Captain Marvel. It's Saturday, the day after the movie opened, so the numbers will probably go up and down from here (but not the CinemaScore, that stays put). But we can compare the current numbers to the scores for previous movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Captain Marvel (2019)(All percentages as of Saturday morning, 3/9, ET)CinemaScore: ARotten Tomatoes: 79% (from 329 reviews)RT Audience Score: 52% (from 28,742 user ratings)IMDb rating: 6.8 (from 62,054 ratings)Metascore: 65 (from 52 critics)
There have been 21 MCU movies as of Captain Marvel. All but one has gotten an A, A-, or A+ from the opening night moviegoers polled by CinemaScore. Captain Marvel joins the team with an average grade of A. (Thor, even with a not-too-shabby B+, you were robbed!) Captain Marvel's Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score, by contrast, is lower than anyone else's and that does seem connected at least in part to the negative campaign against Brie Larson's movie.
Here's how Captain Marvel compares to the 20 previous MCU movies, listed in order of appearance in theaters. Since Iron Man, for example, has been out for more than 10 years, it obviously has more user ratings by this point than Carol Danvers' film.
Iron Man (2008)CinemaScore: ARotten Tomatoes: 93% (274 reviews)RT Audience Score: 91% (1,080,703 user ratings)IMDb rating: 7.9 (836,705 ratings)Metascore: 79 (38 critics)The Incredible Hulk (2008)CinemaScore: A-Rotten Tomatoes: 67%RT Audience Score: 70%IMDb rating: 6.8Metascore: 61Iron Man 2 (2010)CinemaScore: ARotten Tomatoes: 73%RT Audience Score: 71%IMDb rating: 7.0Metascore: 57Thor (2011)CinemaScore: B+Rotten Tomatoes: 77%RT Audience Score: 76%IMDb rating: 7.0Metascore: 57Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)CinemaScore: A-Rotten Tomatoes: 80%RT Audience Score: 74%IMDb rating: 6.9Metascore: 66Marvel's The Avengers (2012)CinemaScore: A+Rotten Tomatoes: 92%RT Audience Score: 91%IMDb rating: 8.1Metascore: 69Iron Man 3 (2013)CinemaScore: ARotten Tomatoes: 80%RT Audience Score: 78%IMDb rating: 7.2Metascore: 62Thor: The Dark World (2013)CinemaScore: A-Rotten Tomatoes: 67%RT Audience Score: 76%IMDb rating: 7.0Metascore: 54Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)CinemaScore: ARotten Tomatoes: 90%RT Audience Score: 92%IMDb rating: 7.8Metascore: 70Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)CinemaScore: ARotten Tomatoes: 91%RT Audience Score: 92%IMDb rating: 8.1Metascore: 76Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)CinemaScore: ARotten Tomatoes: 75%RT Audience Score: 83%IMDb rating: 7.4Metascore: 66Ant-Man (2015)CinemaScore: ARotten Tomatoes: 82%RT Audience Score: 86%IMDb rating: 7.3Metascore: 64Captain America: Civil War (2016)CinemaScore: ARotten Tomatoes: 91%RT Audience Score: 89%IMDb rating: 7.8Metascore: 75Doctor Strange (2016)CinemaScore: ARotten Tomatoes: 89%RT Audience Score: 86%IMDb rating: 7.5Metascore: 72Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)CinemaScore: ARotten Tomatoes: 84%RT Audience Score: 87%IMDb rating: 7.7Metascore: 67Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)CinemaScore: ARotten Tomatoes: 92%RT Audience Score: 88%IMDb rating: 7.5Metascore: 73Thor: Ragnarok (2017)CinemaScore: ARotten Tomatoes: 92%RT Audience Score: 87%IMDb rating: 7.9Metascore: 74Black Panther (2018)CinemaScore: A+Rotten Tomatoes: 97%RT Audience Score: 79%IMDb rating: 7.3Metascore: 88Avengers: Infinity War (2018)CinemaScore: ARotten Tomatoes: 85%RT Audience Score: 91%IMDb rating: 8.5Metascore: 68Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)CinemaScore: A-Rotten Tomatoes: 88%RT Audience Score: 77%IMDb rating: 7.1Metascore: 70
Those MCU percentages will probably change over time as well, in little increments, but not the CinemaScore, which is fixed from opening night moviegoers. From here, the MCU sees the opening of Avengers: Endgame in just over a month on April 26. Then the third MCU movie of 2019 opens with the Marvel/Sony movie Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5.
Keep up with everything heading to theaters this year with our 2019 movie release date schedule. Avengers: Endgame is meant to shake up the MCU, so keep up with all of the changes from here with our handy Marvel Cinematic Universe guide.
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