Critics and audiences have always had a complicated relationship, and nowhere is that truce shakier than at the multiplex. For every film that unites rave reviews with sold-out crowds, there is a handful of projects that reviewers dismiss while fans cheerfully embrace. Or, on the contrary, critically acclaimed movies sometimes struggle to find the same enthusiasm from paying spectators. Marvel and DC are filled with movies that got middling reviews but still hauled a decent box office result. More recently, even The Super Mario Galaxy Movie had a lukewarm critical reception that nevertheless didn’t stop it from crossing the coveted one billion mark.
A mixed critical reception can be shrugged off. Yet when reviews are truly abysmal, the usual result is a box-office flop. The 1990s, however, produced a rogue collection of films that defied that logic. Some of these movies even became cult classics, reappraised after their initial reception declared them dead on arrival.
In 1998, Adam Sandler was still building the wildly loyal fan base that would make him one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars, and The Waterboy tested that loyalty by pushing his man-child persona to its giddy extreme. In the movie, Sandler plays Bobby Boucher, a socially stunted water boy for a college football team whose hidden talent for tackling turns him into an unlikely defensive star.
The plot of The Waterboy is a string of slapstick sketches and Southern-fried eccentricity, wrapped around a simple underdog story. Unsurprisingly, critics were largely hostile, calling the film lazy, loud, and proudly stupid in review after review. Audiences, in their turn, saw a cheerfully ridiculous sports comedy they could quote endlessly. The Waterboy opened at number one in North America and remained there for multiple weeks, ultimately earning more than $161 million domestically, for a $186 million worldwide total. The film’s success proved that Sandler’s brand of absurdity had a colossal built-in audience, one that didn’t need a critic’s permission to laugh.
Video-game adaptations have rarely been critical darlings, but 1995’s Mortal Kombat took that disregard to new heights while simultaneously delivering exactly what its target audience demanded. Paul W.S. Anderson’s martial-arts fantasy follows three fighters summoned to a mysterious island to defend Earthrealm against the sorcerer Shang Tsung, a premise that serves primarily as scaffolding for acrobatic combat and catchphrases.
Reviewers recoiled from the thin plot of Mortal Kombat and cheesy dialogue, dismissing the picture as a mindless effects reel with nothing to offer beyond its visual gimmickry. Moviegoers ignored the panning and propelled Mortal Kombat to a number-one opening weekend that dethroned Die Hard with a Vengeance. It went on to become one of the highest-grossing video-game movies of its era, with $122 million, spawning an enduring franchise that recently got rebooted. If that doesn’t look like much, it’s worth considering that the movie cost a measly $20 million to make. Mortal Kombat’s iconic techno theme and its faithful translation of the game’s character roster created a communal cinema experience that critics failed to measure, and in the decades since, the original movie has become a classic.
Lawrence Kasdan’s romantic thriller The Bodyguard casts Kevin Costner as Frank Farmer, a stoic ex-Secret Service agent hired to protect Rachel Marron (Whitney Houston), a music icon being stalked by a dangerous admirer. On paper, The Bodyguard had all the ingredients of a prestige hit: a global pop superstar making her screen debut, a rugged leading man, and a soundtrack that was handcrafted to shatter sales records. Critics, however, were unmoved. Reviews were overwhelmingly negative, with many writers labelling it an inert, melodramatic misfire that squandered the chemistry of its central pairing.
Audiences roundly ignored those verdicts. The Bodyguard held the number-one spot for three weeks in late 1992, eventually grossing over $121 million domestically and more than $400 million worldwide. Houston’s soundtrack, anchored by her immortal cover of “I Will Always Love You,” became the best-selling soundtrack of all time, cementing the film as a cultural juggernaut. Nowadays, The Bodyguard is remembered as one of the greatest love stories Hollywood has ever made.
If ever a movie buried critics with a fortune, it is Michael Bay’s 1998 doomsday epic Armageddon. The story is famously straightforward, as a ragtag crew of deep-core oil drillers, led by Bruce Willis, is blasted into space to destroy a Texas-sized asteroid on a collision course with Earth. The film’s over-caffeinated editing and cheerful disregard for the laws of physics drew some of the most scathing reviews of the decade. Critics lined up to denounce Armageddon as an overblown spectacle, a special-effects juggernaut that mistook volume for emotion and reduced its cast to paper-thin stereotypes.
Audiences, unbothered by the critical pile-on, turned Armageddon into a phenomenon. It debuted at number one and stayed there for four consecutive weekends, eventually becoming the highest-grossing film worldwide of 1998 with over $550 million in global ticket sales. Bay’s brand of unapologetic excess, paired with a soundtrack dominated by Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” gave viewers a cathartic thrill ride that no amount of disapproving prose could dampen. As such, Armageddon remains the definitive example of a critic-proof blockbuster.
Which 1990s critic-proof smash do you still defend? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
