Variety‘s Steven Gaydos has tweeted a point he made in a 2.26.18 Guardian article titled “Ripe For A Kicking: Hollywood’s Love-Hate Relationship with Rotten Tomatoes. The thrust is that critics have become more and more whore-ish over the last 10 or 15 years.

“Critics have trained themselves to [pretend to] take seriously movies that they don’t take seriously because the danger is not having a job and not being ‘relevant’, being aged out of the discussion.

“The numbers bear out this trend. The median Tomatometer score for movies grossing more than $2 million was 51% during the 2000s and 53% during the 2010s. In 2017, though, the year of crashes such as Baywatch and Pirates of the Caribbean 5, the median was 71%. Either critics are enjoying movies more or movies are better than ever.”

Uhm, movies are not better than ever, or weren’t the last time I cheoked.

Sturgeon’s law doesn’t quite apply to the movie realm. 70% of films tend to be underwhelming, weak, bad, formulaic, dispiriting or numbing. 15% tend to be fair, decent, pretty good, passable. 10% are usually good to very good, and less than 5% are brilliant or epic or genius-level. This is how it usually shakes out, year in and year out. One out of four.

Anyone giving thumbs-up reviews to more than 40% or 50% of releases is being overly generous, and I myself am being generous in using this term.