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'mother!' earns rare F CinemaScore

shintoki

sparkle this bitch
all transformers movies range from B+ to A

whatever this score is measuring, there's clearly a slant towards movies that are enjoyable for their entertainment value

these films aren't exactly uplifting, but were marketed correctly
gone girl: B
eternal sunshine: B-
nightcrawler: B-

but it does seem like the worst thing you can do is misleading marketing
unbreakable: C
eyes wide shut: D-

Cinescore is pretty easy to grasp.

It's people going to see the film and basically, is it what they expect? As someone said, Transformers scores high, but the people going to see it know what they are expecting. Movies like Unbreakable, Eyes Wide Shut. I don't think it's what the audience expected. Hence a more negative opinion. It's why a lot of terrible films still get decent cinescore ones. The people going to see something like Tyler Perry, which I do think most of them get an A, know what to expect. The target audience likes it. You can have depressing movies too, but the audience has to know that going into it. You can't blind side them, otherwise you'll attract a difference audience which is going to be receptive of it. This is a fault of the marketing from either studio or producer/director input.

Basically, if a film wants to do some sort of bait and switch, they need to do it extremely well.
 

wazoo

Member
I bet all Kubrick films would get F Cinemascores if it were a thing back then XD

Straight from Wikipedia

"Writing in the introduction to a recent edition of Michel Ciment's Kubrick, film director Martin Scorsese notes that most of Kubrick's films were misunderstood when first released, and came to be regarded as masterpieces only in the years after their releases"
 

barit

Member
HITB will be interesting when reviewing this "masterpiece"

Especially Mike´s opinion since he is such a huge JLaw fan haha
 
My friend said he read a review that claimed they (major spoiler)
eat her one-day-old baby
. We were going to see it before he read that, now we're not seeing it lol. If an audience went in without knowing that was going to happen, I could see them giving it an F. Even the scene in The VVitch
also about baby killing and did not show anything
still made me EXTREMELY uncomfortable (good movie tho). But people in my audience walked out.

Like I really doubt this audience rating deal is anything more complex than a shock moment gone wrong since that kind of thing really upsets people.
It's quite literally communion
 

wazoo

Member
It appealed to enough audiences to do really well over the summer. It was the surprise hit.

Box office success.

That was the case for transformer saga for most of its titles (maybe not the last one). Do you think transformer appeal to most audiences ?

Audiences are a pyramid with the "elitist" ones at the top (if you rank them in demographic size).
 
It's quite literally communion

Movie spoilers:

Transubstantiation and eating an honest to god newborn are pretty different things, even in Catholic dogma. Nobody is eating Baby Jesus. I fully understand the point the director was making but its clearly being played for shock value, when you could show the exact same point by having the cult eat JLaw to less pushback. Probably, anyway. I thinking The Walking Dead had probably gotten most people over seeing an adult get eaten.
 
Interestingly enough, Babadook initially got terrible audience impressions but now everyone seems to love it.

Dat Netflix exposure. Plus that fucking kid, even knowing he was just an actor I still hated his guts to the point it was actively making me like the movie less, despite that being the entire point! Joffery Baratheon effect, I guess.
 
Movie spoilers:

Transubstantiation and eating an honest to god newborn are pretty different things, even in Catholic dogma. Nobody is eating Baby Jesus. I fully understand the point the director was making but its clearly being played for shock value, when you could show the exact same point by having the cult eat JLaw to less pushback. Probably, anyway. I thinking The Walking Dead had probably gotten most people over seeing an adult get eaten.
I mean,
it's a literal visual represenation of eating the flesh and blood of Christ. And the movie aint kind to Catholic dogma; God is a selfish dick who doesnt care about his creations and religion is not a good thing but something used by people as justification for horrific acts
 
Box office success.

That was the case for transformer saga for most of its titles (maybe not the last one). Do you think transformer appeal to most audiences ?

Audiences are a pyramid with the elitist ones at the top (if you rank them in demographic size).

The Transformers movies used to appeal to most audiences but now in a post-MCU era I think most audiences expect their nerd properties to be treated better.
 

Thewonandonly

Junior Member
The trailer before "It" was embarrassing. I knew that the film was an arthouse movie but that trailer made it look like a big mainstream horror movie. The narrator was saying "THE SCARIEST MOVIE EVER", "REMEMBER WHERE YOU WERE WHEN YOU SAW MOTHER" and "BUY YOUR TICKETS AFTER THE MOVIE"

I'm 100% unsurprised, people were duped, just like It Comes At Night & The Witch.
Ya that trailer was fucking dumb. Movie companies for the love of god never ever put a preorder ad at the end of your trailer it doesn't work. Also if your going with the narrator route you can't show the movie you have to show reactions of people in the audience.

Compare this trailer to the trailer of parenornal activity. Both going for the same idea but one Is drastically better
 
I mean,
it's a literal visual represenation of eating the flesh and blood of Christ. And the movie aint kind to Catholic dogma; God is a selfish dick who doesnt care about his creations and religion is not a good thing but something used by people as justification for horrific acts

Its tricky just outright saying that Communion is cannibalism because, while you are technically eating God, you aren't literally eating flesh belong to god. It's weird.
It more like "God puts himself into this bread, thus it is God, and eating it makes you closer to God". But even the first Communion Jesus wasn't cutting pieces of himself off for the disciples; he just blessed the food and had it cement their bond. The confusion comes from the rhetoric that Jesus technically IS God, in addition to being his son. Boiling that down into "So you eat babies" is really schlocky, almost Romero-esque, though by that point in the movie the gloves were off so I guess the shock value was the important bit.
 

robotrock

Banned
Expectations are a factor in one's impressions, so reviews already do

I get it, but I still think factoring expectations into your reviews and even impressions kind of sucks. Like when I read a review talking about underrated/overrated and overhyped/underhyped, I don't think either of those mean much.
 

Farsi

Member
It's hard for me to blame the mainstream audience when this movie is marketed towards them but it's not actually a movie for them.
 
There's not much more to be mined from a film like this after its opening weekend, but I think they should be embracing the "F" CinemaScore in the advertising as yet another sign that "No one was prepared for mother!" or something.

That'd be a pretty fair assessment.
 
I think the problem is that the movie gives wrong impression from trailer.
People go in expecting a Rosemary baby type horror movie but what they got was something different.
 
So this isn't shock value trash like A Serbian Film or torture porn like Hostel right

I mean even if it's artsy or avant garde not sure I want to watch anything like that
 

SexyFish

Banned
There's not much more to be mined from a film like this after its opening weekend, but I think they should be embracing the "F" CinemaScore in the advertising as yet another sign that "No one was prepared for mother!" or something.

That'd be a pretty fair assessment.

Heh, a trailer with highly negative and positive reviews would be an interesting change of marketing, but I don't think Paramount is putting anything else for this now.
 

robotrock

Banned
So this isn't shock value trash like A Serbian Film or torture porn like Hostel right

I mean even if it's artsy or avant garde not sure I want to watch anything like that

The movie becomes so ridiculous at a point that everything that could be considered shocking just comes off as hilarious.
 

sleepykyo

Member
the fast and the furious movies are among the dumbest movies I have ever seen and when their latest installment gets an A and mother an F then I know exactly how to judge these results.

That marketing was awful and misleading?

The Fast and the Furious movies are dumb fun and trailers reflect it. The audience that goes to see F&F get what the trailers promised.

Mother! gets marketed as intense, scary horror film. The audience got a graphic something else entirely.
 
I think the problem is that the movie gives wrong impression from trailer.
People go in expecting a Rosemary baby type horror movie but what they got was something different.

Eh, I dunno. Rosemary's Baby is more straightforward than mother! and far less surreal, but both films tap very much into one woman's toxic relationship with her husband, her neighbors, and the truth.

One is far more
of a religious allegory
than the other, but the scenes where you're with Jennifer Lawrence
surrounded by all of these guests who just won't leave as the house devolves into a madhouse
are just as effective in ratcheting up the anxiety as much of what happens in Rosemary's Baby.

I'd be surprised to find many people who were fans of one, but hated the other.
 

Jawmuncher

Member
I'm a member of the audience and I loved it.

Yeah that makes more sense. I try my best to avoid the marketing, but I get it.

I remember seeing It Comes at Night earlier this year, and was shocked to see a lot of very negative audience reactions. I guess it was marketed more as a regular horror movie?
Hell yeah they marketed IcAn wrong. Made the movie look like it was something to do with a monster or zombies or something. The general horror audience doesn't like to get duped it seems.
 

Korigama

Member
While I have no particular interest in this movie and had no real idea what it was even supposed to be about based on the ads, in addition to not particularly trusting CinemaScore assessments (the Star Wars prequels all got A's as it is), being given an F winds up putting this in the same company as Nicolas Cage's The Wicker Man.
 

zethren

Banned
Not really? It's kinda uncategorizable though, I don't really know how you would market it. It's kind of a hyper-surreal psychological thriller/incredibly black comedy with some Cronenberg-y body horror elements, it's more Luis Bunuel or David Lynch than it is a quote-unquote horror movie.

I was already curious about it, but your description has sold me 100%. That said, based on your description, I can see why casual movie goers would be wary.
 

yepyepyep

Member
Does the film have a lot of jump scares? I like Aronofsky and I am intrigued by the trailer. But I don't like seeing horror films at the cinema because they play the sound too loud and I find films with lots of jump scares too tense for me lol. I might have to wait until its available to stream in that case.
 

zeemumu

Member
Paramount really fucked up with the marketing of this picture. The film should have been marketed as a more niche artsy-horror title instead of a mass-market picture. The same mis-marketing happened to "The VVitch" and "It Comes At Night" too, and both got mediocre Cinemascores as well.

Happened to Crimson Peak as well. I'm guessing this is the equivalent of advertising Black Swan as a horror film?
 

Sagroth

Member
I didn't realize "Bug" had scored an F. My spouse and I fucking hated that movie, but a large part of that was the marketing for the movie lied.

Edit:

Today I learned my hate of Bug is justified by a well known source.

Let's be friends.
 

robotrock

Banned
Does the film have a lot of jump scares? I like Aronofsky and I am intrigued by the trailer. But I don't like seeing horror films at the cinema because they play the sound too loud and I find films with lots of jump scares too tense for me lol. I might have to wait until its available to stream in that case.

Nah, it's real real light on the jumpscares.
 

ItIsOkBro

Member
Cinescore is pretty easy to grasp.

It's people going to see the film and basically, is it what they expect? As someone said, Transformers scores high, but the people going to see it know what they are expecting. Movies like Unbreakable, Eyes Wide Shut. I don't think it's what the audience expected. Hence a more negative opinion. It's why a lot of terrible films still get decent cinescore ones. The people going to see something like Tyler Perry, which I do think most of them get an A, know what to expect. The target audience likes it. You can have depressing movies too, but the audience has to know that going into it. You can't blind side them, otherwise you'll attract a difference audience which is going to be receptive of it. This is a fault of the marketing from either studio or producer/director input.

Basically, if a film wants to do some sort of bait and switch, they need to do it extremely well.

there are expectations that moviegoers have overall that go beyond marketing. the good guy wins, the bad guy gets his comeuppance, the couple ends up happily together. eternal sunhine, nightcrawler etc. should have A cinema scores it expectations were only set by marketing.
 

Robot Pants

Member
Cinemascore is an American thing, so it could be also since America is a very religious country, that how the film goes is kind of I guess blasphemous so Americans got pissed off? I think that's at least part to it. The main trailer markets it as a domestic invasion thriller and it sticks to that throughout the film, just has a lot more ambition and allegorical elements to it rather than scares and monsters (Conjuring, Insidious, etc).

I bet all Kubrick films would get F Cinemascores if it were a thing back then XD
What is this
 

commedieu

Banned
The trailer before "It" was embarrassing. I knew that the film was an arthouse movie but that trailer made it look like a big mainstream horror movie. The narrator was saying "THE SCARIEST MOVIE EVER", "REMEMBER WHERE YOU WERE WHEN YOU SAW MOTHER" and "BUY YOUR TICKETS AFTER THE MOVIE"

I'm 100% unsurprised, people were duped, just like It Comes At Night & The Witch.

This is how the radio campaign is going too. Like it's another paranormal activity or some shit. I'm the states.

It's like that SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY, MONSTERTRUCKS TO FUCK YOU UP! voice.
 
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