Entertainment
New Scream Movie Panned By Critics Over Politics, Breaks Franchise Box-Office Records
By Jennifer Asencio
| Published
According to film critics, Scream 7 is the death of the franchise. With an aggregate of 33% from 120 critic reviews as of this writing, it’s easy to believe they are right. There is just one problem: the movie is so popular that it’s poised to break opening-weekend franchise records.
The previous record was set by Scream VI, which opened with $44 million. The new movie is projected to approach or break $50 million, with some estimates as high as $59 million. Fans gave Scream 7 a 77% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, indicating a big gap between audiences and critics.
How Politics Influences The Reviews Of Critics
The one thing that all the bad reviews have in common is discussion of the firing of Melissa Barerra and the subsequent departure of Jenna Ortega, both of whom played characters central to the two previous installations. Barerra was fired for making inflammatory remarks about Israel’s response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, sentiments which are shared by many in the entertainment industry; Ortega left in protest of Barrera’s dismissal. A lot of critics and major entertainment news venues sympathize with Barrera’s views, and some of these are gleefully reporting the Rotten Tomatoes critics’ ratings as though it means something for the movie.
Critics also infamously panned the biopic of the First Lady, Melania, with an even wider gap of 11% based on 53 reviews, while over 1000 audience reviewers average 98%. They are also offering great praise to the politically motivated series Starfleet Academy, the latest Star Trek show that hasn’t really resonated with fans, but which we keep being told is the best Star Trek yet. Meanwhile, the Daily Wire+ show The Pendragon Cycle has been ignored by mainstream critics, with no score on Rotten Tomatoes at all, not even a 0, despite an average of 85% from viewers.
What this all indicates is that industry reviewers are circling the wagons based on political divides rather than giving honest reviews. They are evaluating movies with greater consideration of whether they check certain boxes off-screen, and are boycotting or panning films that don’t neatly fit their mold. Critics are relying on their authority as insiders to dictate culture through the lens of politics rather than examining movies on their own merits and audience potential.
Professional Review Bombing
Some commenters have even accused the collective of mainstream critics of “review bombing” Scream 7. Review bombing is a phenomenon in which individuals give a movie a bad rating for some motive outside the show. Recently, a review bombing war between A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms fans and Breaking Bad fans resulted in the IMDB rating of the latter’s crowning episode, “Ozymandias,” being reduced to a 9.5 from a perfect 10. The war started because the Game of Thrones spinoff received some bad reviews from Breaking Bad fans, who may or may not have been acting in bad faith.
However, those are individuals, even if some of them coordinated via an internet campaign. They are not the professionals relied on to be unbiased and to evaluate movies and television based on the productions themselves, not on who made them or their politics. The fact that the critics don’t seem to be connected to what audiences seem to want makes it even worse, because we are all being told that liking the stuff we like makes us bigoted if they don’t like it. And they also seem to think that if they ignore it altogether, like with The Pendragon Cycle, that maybe it will slip by unnoticed.
How much of our culture is being suppressed by critics with political agendas? Scream 7 indicates that the question needs to be asked as it is such a runaway hit that the motives of mainstream reviewers may not be critique, but activism.