Why the Hate, Critics?
At the time of this writing, Batman v Superman is currently rocking a 23% rotten score over at the noted vegetable aggregation site. However, said site also notes that 72% of audience members like it, with the average score being a 3.8/5. So, what gives? Why the disconnect between the reviewers and the plebs?Is it because the movie is too "grimdark?" Could be. Critics have only reluctantly accepted comic book blockbusters as a legitimate art form. Marvel has occupied the lion's share of this space, and they're usually fairly upbeat, with constant jokes to maintain levity during near apocalypse situations. Nolan's Batverse is the exception here, but Nolan is clearly One of Them. The man is a director with plenty of bona fides that let critics give him a pass. So, if it's not the grimdark, what is it?
A Post-HBO World
Movie reviewers are, by and large, aesthetes. They consider a film on its merits as an individual unit. Because they consider it an individual unit, they dislike evaluating it in conjunction with other films, unless it's part of a clearly demarcated trilogy, like Lord of the Rings.
We live in the age of the comic book movie now, but more importantly, serialized dramas are what audiences have come to expect from their entertainment. The Sopranos transformed HBO into the mecca for premium TV, but it affected much more than HBO. Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead don't exist without a mobster in New Jersey exploring his midlife crisis via Lorraine Bracco. The Sopranos made creatives realize they could tell stories that had all the polish of a movie in a non theater format. Not only that, but they could tell them outside of a tightly edited 2 hour run time. Game of Thrones could last as long as 8 seasons, or roughly eighty hours of story telling time. That's the equivalent of forty movies.
HBO's success got Amazon and Netflix into the game. Broadcast TV is no slouch either. AMC, CBS, and The CW have all attained success via series that started as comic book properties.
AMC has The Walking Dead which has six seasons so far, and it has spawned its own bastard sibling series: Fear The Walking Dead. AMC also had the mega hit Breaking Bad which also spawned its own bastard child: Better Call Saul. Better Call Saul contains nods and references to its parent series. Continuing the give no fucks attitude of the Sopranos, the writers simply assume you've seen the predecessor.
The CW, so far, has The Flash and Arrow. CBS is running Supergirl. But all three, on two different networks mind you, have crossovers, nods, winks, back-pats, and touches from one series to another. If you're only watching one show, you're only handling one strand in the web.
All of these interdependent series share a common assumption that viewers are smart enough to piece together the various references from one show to the next. And if not, there are plenty of click-bait sites that will piece things together for viewers even if they miss it the first time around.
As HBO Goes, So Goes the Nation
The aforementioned Marvel movies have easter eggs, and nods to previous iterations, but all of their movies can be enjoyed in situ. They're still films: each one an independently functioning piece of art. Warner Brothers, in its haste to catch up to Disney in comic book movie continuity, has stumbled on to what is most likely the next step in movies: continual, serialized films that do not function as as an Army of One, but instead are hoplites in the DC phalanx.
The first 90 minutes you keep seeing people bitch about? That's the cold open for the DC movie universe. It will make sense in time, but not at the time of the initial movie release. This isn't a movie that stands on its own, and most audience members understand this on an instinctual level. They've been conditioned by HBO and Netflix to accept serialized content. So, why would a movie be any different? The answer: Batman v Superman wasn't a movie. It was just the pilot.
