Not only the flops, but also the successful movies with half-and-half reviews. Could it be that the ubiquity of the Internet has made it impossible for any creative work to get overwhelmingly positive reactions anymore? Maybe we should adjust our expectations and start to consider, say, 60% positive to be excellent. 60% is often considered a landslide victory in elections.

I agree 60% with Linda's point.

Movies like The Avengers, The Dark Knight, Star Trek: Into Darkness, and several others have gotten 85% or better, so it is possible -- a movie just has to be good enough to warrant that kind of reaction.

Probably not any creative work, but for big budget tent-pole movies? Yeah, you're probably right. Although, looking at rottentomatoes, Star Trek Into Darkness currently holds 87% positive for critics and 91% for audiences. And Oz the Great and Powerful is the sixth highest grossing movie of 2013, but has 59% for both.

I suppose a BB movie has to have three things in order to be considered "overwhelmingly positive".

1) Over 80% critical approval
2) Over 60% audience approval
3) At least half it's production budget made back on opening weekend

You can have 1) and 2), but if 3) doesn't happen, public opinion starts to turn.

60% is pretty good. When a movie is "not good," it tends to fall way down the scale. Anything in the upper half I consider a potential worthy effort, where personal taste becomes the overriding criteria. Especially when something is different or risky. So to me the percentage is just a snapshot.

So, yes, Linda. I think in this day and age when things are ruthlessly scored right out of the gate, we should take notice when something pushes well above 50/50, like in the 60+ range.

This sounds about 99% true.

The one this year that I felt most out-of-step on was Oblivion. It got very middling reviews but I enjoyed it a lot (and it seems like most of the "normal people" non-critics I've interacted with liked it as well.) It got a 54% on RT, but a lot of the reviews called it derivative and stuff we've seen before. Okay, but . . . have we all seen Moon, I guess? That movie was said to be the best thing ever, but it hasn't been widely viewed.

You forgot to put "good" in ironic quotes.

Oblivion was a nice surprise in my house. It felt like a retro-80's sci-fi movie with 21st century effects. The score sounded like it was done by Tangerine Dream.

I know -- and it had that little some "extra" besides visuals and pace. For me, the "extra" kick was the centrality of his love for stories and memorabilia, and how that was the trait that made the difference.

Yeah, big time, and Morgan Freeman didn't kill it for me like he usually does.

That said, the three girls in my house didn't like it. I was the only one that was really impressed by it.

I also enjoyed Oblivion and didn't understand why critics didn't praise a big budget blockbuster type moie that dared to veer away from formula (until the very end, at least).

I should be appointed arbiter of what is "good" and what is "bad."

Too many big movies.

We went from Jaws and Star Wars being the event movies of their Summers to having a few event movies each Summer to having almost weekly event movies.

Something had to give.

And there aren't enough gimmicks to allow for one movie to stand above the rest each year. Avatar had it's new 3-D and Avengers had its 4-movies-in-1 thing, but you can't come up with something like that very often.

Yeah, but that happened almost as soon as Jaws and Star Wars came out.

1982's Summer movie season had Conan the Barbarian, The Road Warrior, Rocky III, Star Trek II, Poltergeist, ET, Grease 2, Firefox, Blade Runner, The Thing, The Secret of NIMH, Tron, Friday the 13th part III, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and The Beastmaster. On top of that, they rereleased Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark for a couple of weekends.

The glut of big budget summer movies isn't new...the glut of failing big budget summer movies is new.

Yep too many movies all crammed into a Summer schedule. I would guess most people are like me and try to cherry pick what we see. So I usually avoid the real bad stuff and just see the cream of the crop like an Iron Man or a Star Trek.

It just seems movies don't have the cultural impact they once had, they come and they go.

I think the glut is much larger. Every week there is a new contender for "biggest movie of the summer". Some weeks there are two.

I wouldn't call many of those movies "Event Movies". Possibly Conan, Rocky III, Star Trek II, ET and Tron. As big as Blade Runner and The Thing may have become, I don't remember them being marketed as the next big thing. And Ridgemont and Beastmaster didn't even have big name stars attached.

I was hoping that this thread would contain spoilers for "Oblivions" since I haven't seen it yet. Please go into more detail about the story.

You're welcome.

In 1982 audiences didn't have multiple cable movie channels. There was no internet. Home video--in the form of bulky cassettes--was just really getting started. The three TV networks might have two science-fiction/fantasy series, with B-movie production values, between them at any given time. If you wanted to see a screen entertainment with really impressive effects and production values you pretty much HAD to go to the movies to see it.

Now there are whole channels that you can watch stuff like this on round the clock. There's all kinds of stuff readily available online or on DVD. Big-screen TV sets with stereo are commonplace. All this means that it has gotten very hard indeed to lure people into the movie theaters to watch a movie.

I spelled "Oblivion" wrong.