The gap between critics and audiences has never been wider – just look at Melania’s score on Rotten Tomatoes | film

IIf you’re starting to feel like you’re living in a very different reality than most of the world, there’s a good chance it’s because you’ve been looking at the Rotten Tomatoes page for Melania Trump’s documentary. There you will find two diametrically opposed numbers. The first is Rotten Tomatoes’ official score — that score aggregated across published reviews by professional critics — which stands at a paltry 11%. But then there is the audience rating, which is based on the results of members of the general public. This result, incredibly, is 98%. (Admittedly, this score is limited to “verified ticket buyers” — Rotten Tomatoes has another section called “All Audience” where the reaction is more… mixed.)

Of course, there’s been a long gap between popular and critical opinion, which is why the movie that won the most Oscars last year was a small character study about a disenfranchised stripper, and the movie that made the most money was about Minecraft. However, the disparity between the harsh reviews Melania received (“the most depressing experience I have ever had at the cinema” – Mark Kermode) and the overall glowing reviews (“every red-blooded American needs to see this film to recognize the grace, complexity and power of Flautius”) [sic]”-Jackie) It’s enough to give you a hit.

Who could be wrong here? Is it the liberal press seizing the opportunity to take a jab at an unpopular president by destroying his wife’s expensive vanity project? Or maybe it’s the general reviewers who decided (and this is just wild speculation) to flood the site with fake reviews in a coordinated attempt to undermine dissenting voices. Who can say?

Either way, with an 87% difference between critics and audiences, Melania will now go down in history as the film with the largest gap between critical and popular scores. No one will be sadder about this than the people behind Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, which held the title until recently. Professional critics gave this film a low score of 16%, while audiences liked it enough that it received a score of 84%. Before that, according to research by digital entertainment platform JB.com, the film with the biggest gap was 2024’s Emilia Perez. Although it won the Jury Prize at Cannes and received a 70% critical score, the film’s audience gave it only 17%. There are others. The 2021 film Red Notice starring Dwayne Johnson received a score of 37% from critics and 92% from audiences. The Jigsaw sequel scored 32% with critics and 88% with audiences. Under the Skin, directed by Jonathan Glazer, received a rating of 83% from critics and 55% from audiences.

There are clearly two types of bias going on here. The movies that do best with audiences tend to be typical crowd pleasers like Red Notice and Jigsaw. They exist to be familiar and unchallengeable, qualities that critics have historically rejected. And who can blame them, because all they do is watch movies. All they want to see is something that breaks the monotony of acceptable entertainment. A horror movie about a sexy alien being burned alive in Scotland is more likely to do than a Ryan Reynolds buddy comedy.

Another bias is that the two films that did poorly with audiences – Emilia Perez and Under the Skin – had female leads in the films. This doesn’t mean the audience hates women, but it does mean that an obnoxious quarter of the audience gets a little weirded out when a movie deals with women, black people, or transgenderism in any way. Emilia Perez’s star, Carla Sofía Gascón, has been in hot water for a number of reasons, but look at the films she’s bombed in the past. Female superhero movies like Captain Marvel. Women-oriented remakes like Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters. The Last Jedi with its non-white female characters. The Little Mermaid in her non-ginger mermaid. There is a pattern to these things, and the pattern suggests that many of these public reviews – and perhaps even Melania’s reviews – were ideologically motivated.

You have to take both grades with a pinch of salt. On the one hand, critics tend to be highbrow, which means they’re more likely to belittle something designed to sit strongly with audiences. On the contrary, people who leave comments online for free are complete weirdos.

But the gap is here to stay. You may have noticed that the gap between critics and audiences widens every year. Emilia Perez’s 53% gap in 2024 became Five Nights at Freddy’s 2’s 68% gap in 2025, and it’s now an 87% gap thanks to Melania. It’s impossible to imagine this will ever be overcome – Melania was certainly released under ideal conditions for a cent gap – but then again we’ve said it before. Maybe one day something will come along that surpasses that. A film made by a truly controversial person, dealing with a very sensitive subject that has caused people to lose their minds for thousands of years. A film that will start a boring, exhaustive, multi-sided discussion that will continue for months and months until everyone loses the will to live. In other words: The Resurrection of Christ by Mel Gibson, this is your time to shine.