Critics Gave Practical Magic 2 a 39%. Audiences Gave It 92%. Only One of Those Groups Bought a Ticket.
Practical Magic 2 opened No. 1 with a 53-point gap between its Tomatometer and its audience score, and the internet already has a tidy story about what that means. The tidy story is wrong. The 1998 original had almost the same gap, the widest divide Rotten Tomatoes has ever recorded belongs to a film nobody is calling good, and a 92% from verified ticket-buyers is measuring something other than quality.
Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass Benched Its Own Stars — And Critics Are Furious
The first fully CG Tom and Jerry feature landed in US theaters on September 4 with a Metacritic score of 24. The complaint from Empire, Variety, The Guardian and The Irish Times is not that it is bad — it is that Tom and Jerry are barely in it. Here is what actually happened, and why “legacy character as mascot” is now a business model.
Stop Calling Disclosure Day the Next Matrix Before You've Bought a Ticket
The Paris premiere happened a week ago. The film opens wide in America on Friday. And somehow, on the strength of a trailer, a Williams score, and a Le Grand Rex afterparty, half the internet has already decided Disclosure Day is a paradigm shift. Look — calm down. Here's the part nobody wants to say out loud.
Enough Already: Why the Era of the "Nostalgia Reboot" Needs to End
Hollywood spent the last decade strip-mining your childhood, and 2026 is the year the receipts came due. The Mummy crashed. Mortal Kombat II got beaten by Miranda Priestly in a wig. Masters of the Universe is the next coin flip. The lesson is sitting right there — if anyone in the C-suite would look at it.
Mortal Kombat II Lost to a Holdover About Handbags — The R-Rated Video Game Ceiling Has Been This Low for 30 Years
Look, I'm going to say something nobody at a Hollywood pitch meeting wants to hear: Mortal Kombat II opened to $40 million this weekend — the best opening of the entire Mortal Kombat film franchise, by the way — and it still got out-grossed by a sequel about a fashion magazine editor. In its second weekend. A holdover. A legacy comedy. About clothes.
Stop Defending The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. The Franchise Just Hit $2 Billion of Pure Nostalgia Bait.
Nintendo and Illumination just pushed the Mario film franchise past $2 billion in combined worldwide gross. Critics still landed on "mixed to negative" for Galaxy. And I'm tired of pretending the box office is the same thing as a defense.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 Earns Its Existence — But Not For The Reason You Think
Look, I came in ready to write the "we didn't need this sequel" piece. The Devil Wears Prada 2 had every disadvantage a 20-year-old legacy comedy sequel could have. So why did I leave the theater thinking the only honest critique left is one nobody's saying out loud?
The Devil Wears Prada 2 Earns Its Existence — But Not For The Reason You Think
Look, I came in ready to write the "we didn't need this sequel" piece. The Devil Wears Prada 2 had every disadvantage a 20-year-old legacy comedy sequel could have. So why did I leave the theater thinking the only honest critique left is one nobody's saying out loud?
Stop Defending Euphoria. Season 3 Isn't Ambitious — It's Exhausted.
Euphoria Season 3 is the lowest-rated season in the show's history. 48% audience. 54% Popcornmeter. Episode 2 — 'America My Dream' — spent 55 minutes proving everyone right. Maybe the style really is the substance. And maybe that's finally the problem.
Supergirl Didn't Need Earth, Superman, or a Safety Net — And That's Why It Works
The DCU's second film sent its lead to space with a dog and a teenager instead of giving audiences another Metropolis slugfest. James Gunn just made the most confident creative bet in superhero cinema this year.
Toy Story 5 Didn't Need to Exist — But Does It Justify Itself?
Pixar had the perfect ending. Toy Story 4 wrapped everything up with a bow so clean it made grown adults sob in parking lots. So why are we here again? Because Disney smelled money, Pixar found a theme worth chasing, and somehow — against all odds — there might be a reason this movie exists.