Critics Loved These Franchise Reboots. The Fans? Not So Much.

Ghostbusters (2016) Got Solid Reviews. The Internet Decided It Didn't Matter.

Critics actually liked this one — a 74% Tomatometer score with plenty of praise for its cast — but the audience score cratered to roughly 49%, and that gap didn't come out of nowhere. The all-female reboot became a target months before release, and the backlash was less about the finished film than about who was in it.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi Has One Of The Biggest Critic/Fan Splits Ever Recorded

A 93% critic score against a 54% audience score isn't a small gap — it's one of the widest ever tracked on Rotten Tomatoes for a major release. Director Rian Johnson later said he understood why: he took the story somewhere fans didn't ask for, and passionate love doesn't always survive a plot twist you didn't see coming.

Terminator: Dark Fate Got Some Of The Franchise's Best Reviews In Years. It Still Bombed.

Dark Fate landed a 67% Tomatometer score, genuinely competitive for a franchise that had spent over a decade putting out critical disasters. But fans had already checked out after Genisys, and killing off a legacy character in the opening minutes only deepened the resentment, dragging the movie to one of the worst opening weekends in series history.

The Matrix Resurrections Split Even Its Own Audience Score In Half

This one is genuinely strange: Resurrections' verified-audience score landed right in line with critics, but its regular, unverified audience score dropped dramatically lower — a gap analysts flagged as unusually harsh for a franchise re-up. The marketing sold a full-throttle action epic; the movie delivered a meta, humor-heavy meditation on why it exists at all, and plenty of longtime fans felt bait-and-switched.

Mulan (2020) Was Certified Fresh. Fans Wanted Their Songs Back.

Disney's live-action Mulan hit a certified-fresh 79% with critics, who mostly bought into its more serious, war-epic tone. Audiences dropped it over 20 points lower, and a lot of that frustration traced straight back to a specific creative call: stripping out the musical numbers and Mushu left longtime fans feeling like the heart of the story went with them.