In the year 2000, a male gynecologist at the end of his rope is sucked into the sky by a tornado; he lands across the border, in Mexico, in the home of a woman giving birth and in need of an OBGYN. In 2006, a southern couple, strung out on crack and conspiracies, douse themselves in gasoline and flick a lighter to put an end to what they believe is a government-funded infestation of bugs. In 2017, a nameless woman is swallowed in flames after the entire world shows up at her doorstep to worship her husband. In all of the above cases, an audience walks out, furious and ready to tell someone about it.
Entertainment lets us down all the time, but it’s rare to consume something rank enough to break out the soapbox. CinemaScore is there when that need arises. The Las Vegas-based market research firm is hardly the only exit-polling company to work with Hollywood, but it might be the most ubiquitous. Its model is simple enough to make stakeholders drool: pollsters distribute ballot cards to audiences across America on a film’s opening night. A filmgoer rates the movie on a scale from A to F, checks a few demographic boxes, and drops their card into a ballot box. Of course, anyone who braves long lines and sold-out crowds to be the first to see a movie is likely predisposed to give it good marks, so CinemaScore weighs a film’s average grade—through a formula the company keeps close to its chest—before selling its data to studios. That means a C is bad news for a flick with high hopes at the box office. A movie must truly offend its audience to receive an F, and in the history of CinemaScore, only 22 films have worn that scarlet letter.
There is a glimmer in the patina of CinemaScore’s failing class. The company employs a few guardrails—films typically must open on at least 1,500 screens to qualify for appraisal—that prevent a sea of B movies from flooding its basements. But an elevated floor does nothing to remedy cracks in the ceiling. A shocking number of industry heavyweights have contributed to the canon of Fs, with auteurs like Robert Altman, Jane Campion, Steven Soderbergh, Nora Ephron, and William Friedkin all claiming space on the mantle through movies that deserve to be remembered, if not explicitly praised. The entries from directors with lesser pedigrees often carry their own merit, and even those that fail outright tend to do so spectacularly. There is enough connective tissue among these films to draw substantive hypotheses about the sensibilities of American movie audiences, and pinning yarn across the corkboard of CinemaScore Fs gives shape to a fascinating, lurid anatomy, one that invites an appetite for reevaluation.
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In 1978, Ed Mintz, a genial data processor working with a handful of dental agencies in Los Angeles, joined his wife and a few other couples on a date to see The Cheap Detective. It seemed like a safe bet: everyone in Mintz’s party loved Neil Simon, the movie’s writer; everyone with a sense of decency loved Peter Falk, the movie’s lead; and critics had given The Cheap Detective their stamp of approval. By the time the credits rolled, though, Mintz wondered if those critics had watched the same movie. Neither he nor his friends knew The Cheap Detective was a spoof, and when their palate for hardboiled noir was met with a gag vehicle that could comfortably neighbor The Naked Gun (1988), they couldn’t help but feel they’d been duped. Mintz left the theater seething.
There’s an air of self-mythology when Mintz discusses the birth of his claim to fame, a company that would dig its heel into Hollywood’s scales by the end of the century. In a swarm of angry moviegoers outside the theater, he recalls hearing a man say, “Is anybody here wondering why they can’t get the opinions of actual moviegoers and publish that? We keep getting critics.” The Cheap Detective left a taste in Mintz’s mouth that would stick around through the following day, when he and his family visited temple for Yom Kippur. He kept thinking of the disparity between critics and general audiences as ushers passed out pledge cards with fixed donation suggestions. He tore his pledge number—and a lightbulb went off. By the following year, CinemaScore had been born.
That Mintz’s company grew from the soil of mismanaged expectations is telling: many of the movies derided by CinemaScore audiences received their Fs as a consequence of careless marketing. It is unlikely that audiences turned on Solaris (2002) out of devotion to Stanisław Lem’s 1961 source novel or Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 adaptation, but it’s unfair to assume the Soderbergh film was too highbrow for the hoi polloi. The theatrical trailer for Solaris swells with saccharine orchestral stabs. “Sometimes love is so strong it opens a passageway to a place where the impossible can happen,” read its title cards before plugging Titanic (1997) and Erin Brockovich (2000) among its creators’ bona fides. The movie itself is a somber and eerie exploration of grief’s intersections with identity. For a major sci-fi film of its scale, it’s almost minimalist. George Clooney, Solaris’slead, had recently reached the peak of his marketability with a hot streak of box-office smashes like O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and Ocean’s 11 (2001). When audiences were met not with an intergalactic romance but instead with a dour and clammy slow-burn that borders on agnostic nihilism, they couldn’t stamp Solaris with an F quickly enough.
The trailer for Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly (2012) promises a slick and sultry heist flick with Brad Pitt in the driver’s seat, a Heat (1995)riff for the Obama era that doubles as a chance to turn your brain off for a couple of hours. The movie itself, though, is anything but fun. Killing Them Softly is a doggedly bilious portrait of an America in the death throes of late capitalism, a slow and cynical crime drama that drips with contempt for the powers that left our country hopeless. Dominik’s film is impressively contemporary. It’s set during the boiling point of both the 2008 financial crisis and Barack Obama’s first-term campaign; the movie’s leads rob card games and stage mob hits under red and blue “Hope”billboards and between radio stings from debates with John McCain. Killing Them Softly was released just weeks after Obama’s reelection, and its dire outlook is deliberately incongruous with the rejuvenated optimism ushered in by the news of his second term, however tenuous it may have been. The movie ends with Brad Pitt angrily rejecting Obama’s acceptance speech, spitting to his employer, “I’m living in America, and in America, you’re on your own. America’s not a country. It’s just a business. Now fucking pay me.” Forget that the movie features the best James Gandolfini performance outside The Sopranos. An audience expecting a wild ride with an action movie were never going to accept a brutal send-up of their own naivety instead.
Sometimes, audience expectations are colored by circumstances outside a studio’s control. By the early 2000s, Meg Ryan was the reigning queen of romcoms. She had amassed a career of crowd-friendly roles that often served as formidable showcases for her seemingly boundless charm, from bulletproof classics like When Harry Met Sally… (1989) and Sleepless in Seattle (1993)to sleepy comfort food like Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)and When a Man Loves a Woman (1994). Audiences were so accustomed to Ryan’s brand that her decision to play against type with In the Cut (2003) read like a personal affront. Jane Campion’s maligned psychological thriller is one of the better immediate snapshots of a post-9/11 New York, a vulgar and cutthroat exercise in taboo that intentionally subverts Ryan’s squeaky-clean reputation. The You’ve Got Mail (1998) actor appears fully nude in multiple scenes; her character masturbates in bed and over the phone; her sex scenes feel explicit and subversive even 20 years later, and threaten to bubble into violence at any moment. In the Cut is a riveting movie and one that’s enjoying a revival after Campion’s Oscar win for The Power of the Dog (2021), but initial reactions from critics and audiences alike were severe enough not only to hobble In the Cut’s domestic box-office returns but to slit the ankles of Meg Ryan’s career. She would never replicate the ubiquity and success of her run in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and by the end of the 2000’s, her work all but slowed to a halt.
Lindsay Lohan’s own imploding career would hang a similar anchor on the neck of Chris Sivertson’s I Know Who Killed Me (2007). Lohan was struggling to find her footing with adult roles after a successful run of family and teen movies like The Parent Trap (1998) and Mean Girls (2004), and the aughts were cruel years for women in the spotlight who would not meet the public’s paradoxically puritanical standards. By the time Siverston’s movie began production, reports of Lohan’s difficulties on the set of Georgia Rule (2007)would muddle with her increasingly publicized struggles with substance abuse to nudge her into the center of TMZ’s crosshairs. I Know Who Killed Me is far from a perfect movie, but it owns its camp well and competently executes a razor-sharp concept. Amid a handful of beguiling choices, it manages to run with an intriguing psychological engine that’s somehow as predictive of Twin Peaks: The Return as it is derivative of David Lynch’s earlier body of work. Lohan herself is formidable, if not quite up to the strength of better-known roles, but the extracurriculars in I Know Who Killed Me’s orbitwould kill the movie before its launch. Its global box office was less than half its $20 million budget after CinemaScore audiences gave it the F.
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Curating a roster of libeled films with the narrow focus of CinemaScore’s list of Fs is bound to drum up curiosity, morbid or otherwise. When one considers that a good portion of those 22 movies were judged against their marketing rather than their own merit, it’s only natural to wonder how they might stand in a vacuum. In December 2023, Chicago’s Music Box Theatre launched a series called Who Gives an ‘F,’ through which it recontextualizes the failing CinemaScore movies in an exercise of reappraisal. Bad movies are screened all the time, but there’s nothing arch about Music Box’s mission statement. “We both have perverse fascinations for this sort of thing, and we know there are other people interested, too,” filmmaker Jeremy Marder, who curates the series with critic Matt Cipolla, tells me. “These aren’t cult films, they’re wide release movies with very negative reputations. But now, some of them are considered masterpieces. We don’t want to hold ironic screenings or lean into a ‘bad’ movie series. We’re actually interested in these, and even the movies we don’t like, we’re fascinated by.”
It’s worth noting that a film series covering the opposite end of the CinemaScore spectrum is unlikely to materialize. To date, 108 movies have received an A+ from opening night audiences, the most recent of which include Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour and Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé. Both 2023 concert movies boast preinstalled audiences, a factor that probably speaks to the outsized percentage of conservative and Christian movies that have aced the test (Christian director Jon Erwin appears four times on this list, more than any other filmmaker). But perhaps the greatest unifying factor of CinemaScore’s valedictorians is their reluctance to offend. “The A+ movies tend to reinforce [existing] values, and if they do subvert expectations, that subversion is typically more of an extrapolation,” says Cipolla, citing the decision of Terminator 2 (1991) to buoy the franchise by shifting Schwarzenegger’s character from villain to hero. That’s not to say the A+ movies are dull; many of them are fantastic, with The Fugitive (1993) and The Princess Bride (1987) among the ranks. But winning the hearts of the masses often doesn’t leave much room for risky or otherwise nontraditional choices. By CinemaScore’s standards, a movie like Richard Kelly’s The Box (2009), which marries leftfield interpretations of Eastern spirituality with severe anti-capitalist sentiments, is almost bound to fail, regardless of how thrilling and singular it ends up being.
Who Gives an ‘F’ began with William Friedkin’s Bug (2006), an adaptation of the Tracy Letts play of the same name. Bug is a seedy and paranoid story about a bartender (Ashley Judd) and military veteran (Michael Shannon) who circle the drain of drug-fueled conspiracies as the walls close in around their real-life struggles. The movietrades in debauched melodrama and is deliberately coy with the moral alignment of its leads, but its narrative structure is markedly traditional. At least until its third act, that is. Bug tears through its final 30 minutes with a crescendo of breakneck escalations: Judd and Shannon’s characters cover their motel room in tin foil; Shannon has ripped apart a good percentage of his skin and teeth hunting for insects that likely don’t exist; a man named Dr. Sweet appears and smokes crack before explaining to Judd that (1) Shannon is on the lam from a mental institution, and (2) the bugs they fear are, in fact, real. Bug’s last moments swirl in such a manic cyclone of contradictory delusions that by the time the couple drench themselves in gasoline and set their bodies ablaze, the audience of its theatrical run weren’t interested in what was real and what was not—they just wanted out.
Bug’s ending is useful in decrypting the DNA of many of the better entries in CinemaScore’s failing class. The company’s polling strategy is, by nature, reactive: filmgoers receive a ballot before their pupils can adjust to the light outside the screening room, and they submit their votes just as quickly. That sort of turnaround puts a heavy crown on a film’s final moments. A bad ending can make you feel cheated, or even foolish, for having invested your time in a story that’s content to leave you hanging. Movies like Lost Souls (2000) and FeardotCom (2002) harken back to the low-budget films of the 1970s, not out of reverence for the era or devotion to craft but of their complete abandon for denouement: both horror flicks simply decide to end instead of reaching toward a satisfying conclusion. But Bug’sfinal act is drunk with intention. It is a sensory assault that effectively subverts a story that had just minutes ago felt linear. If its rejection by a theatrical audience is unfortunate, it’s not entirely unexpected: a wild swing of an ending can feel just as jarring as one that’s flat-out bad. It’s hard to fault someone filling out a scorecard on the walk back to their car for failing to differentiate between the two.
Dr. T & the Women (2000) is a movie so bizarre it’s almost hypnotic, but even its strangest moments could not prepare a first-time viewer for its ending. Robert Altman’s misunderstood Popeye (1980) had sentenced the storied director to over a decade of low-budget film and television work, but he’d clawed his way back to acclaim with Academy favorite The Player (1992). By the 21st century, Altman was enjoying the victory lap he’d always deserved: some of his later films would be lauded (Gosford Park, 2001), others forgotten (Cookie’s Fortune, 1999), but all generally spoke to an accomplished director doing work he felt called to. With Dr. T, Altman plays to both his greatest strengths and his most mischievous impulses. Richard Gere is the doctor, a gynecologist with a horde of devoted patients that trip over each other to get an appointment. At home, he contends with a mentally ill wife (Farrah Fawcett), her alcoholic sister (Laura Dern), and his two daughters—a closeted cheerleader (Kate Hudson) and a JFK assassination truther (Tara Reid)—all with competing and demanding agendas. If that plot sounds outrageous, I promise I am underselling it.
Dr. T is a wildly fun showcase of Altman’s knack for casting and for ensemble scenes. It’s also marred by the same Men Are from Mars-flavored misogyny that runs through most pseudopsychology of the 1990s. None of that would matter for CinemaScore audiences, though, by the time Dr. T rolls credits. With his marriage over, his daughter’s wedding in shambles, and his future with his mistress hopeless, Dr. T finds himself careening via tornado toward Mexico, where he will awaken the next day only to deliver, to his bewildered delight, a baby boy. It is an irreverently poetic ending with an almost Ancient Greek sense of fatalism, though far too audacious a swing to gel with a wide audience. Dr. T’sregressive qualities make a positive reappraisal unlikely today, but its bold sensibilities sealed the fate of its initial run.
In a 2017 article for Vulture, writer Kevin Lincoln coined the term “misleading auteurism” as shorthand for the surprising number of F CinemaScore movies directed by otherwise celebrated filmmakers. “On the surface, all of these movies can scan as your average multiplex entry,” Lincoln writes. “But underneath the conventional trappings, these are all films of ambition and, if not necessarily complexity, at least an unconventional approach to their material.” The article was in response to Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017), the last movie to date to make major headlines after receiving its F. mother! is a nightmarish ecological allegory that doubles as one of film’s more intense retellings of the Christian Bible. Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence play a nameless couple, a poet and his wife, living in an idyllic and secluded country home in its own veritable Eden. Their quiet life is interrupted by a sickly man who’s come to meet the poet before he passes. Then his wife shows up, and then his sons, and his sons’ friends, until what seems like an entire planet of people have materialized, each uninvited guest showing less respect for the home than the last.
Aronofsky’s trademark—and ham-fisted—morality drives mother!, but what it lacks in subtlety it compensates for with a frenetic execution of dream logic that amounts to a duly apocalyptic home-invasion story. The movie is a universal exemplar of the qualities that tend to earn an F: an audacious swing from an established director, a consequence of poor marketing (no trailer could convey its literally Biblical ambitions), and an ending of extreme escalations (in its final act, Kristen Wiig shoots a handful of hostages in the head, and a gaggle of zealots eat a baby). mother! is among the most technically adventurous and engaging entries in the CinemaScore failing class. If it isn’t surprising that its theatrical audience would refuse to swallow its penchant for extremes, it is at least disappointing.
mother! is also a reminder that CinemaScore is indicative not of a movie’s quality but of its capacity to perform well at the domestic box office. Universal acclaim often involves appeasing as large an otherwise diverse group of people as possible, and while it’s misguided to insist that the general public is incapable of appreciating a movie as thematically straightforward as mother!, it’s concerning to watch successful marketing become confused with its artistic merit on such a large scale. In fact, the F mother! received was frustrating enough for Martin Scorsese to pen a Hollywood Reporter op-ed on the limits of industry market indicators like CinemaScore and Rotten Tomatoes. “They rate a picture the way you’d rate a horse at the racetrack,” Scorsese writes. “They have everything to do with the movie business and absolutely nothing to do with either the creation or the intelligent viewing of film. The filmmaker is reduced to a content manufacturer and the viewer to an unadventurous consumer.” An unsuspecting audience can’t be blamed for failing to respond to a movie that in all likelihood wasn’t what they had paid to see, but it’s irresponsible to let their reactions dictate the boundaries of that movie’s merit. There is too much money at stake to realistically expect Hollywood to churn out art for art’s sake, and in the absence of nobler intention, it behooves filmgoers to accept critical voices not as the antithesis of public opinion but as metrics for what might warrant their attention.
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Sometimes, of course, a movie just sucks. It would take five years after its founding before CinemaScore could sniff out a movie that riled audiences to the degree that The Cheap Detective had upset Ed Mintz, but Bolero (1984)happily accepted the challenge. The Bo Derek vehicle is a base and incoherent erotic film that sees a young woman traveling the globe to find someone to take her virginity; to call it Around the World in 80 Days meets Sex Drive would be too generous. Bolero’s general dearth of quality might have been forgivable had director John Derek not made the abhorrent decision to film a 14-year-old girl nude; instead, even its potential for ironic viewing is sabotaged by its craven lechery. A handful of more innocent but equally shoddy movies join Bolero in the dregs of the F barrel. Films like Darkness (2002)and FeardotCom are sullen reminders of the stigma the aughts built for horror movies. Uwe Boll’s Alone in the Dark (2005) is such a mess of plot and VFX that you have to wonder whether the end product was just an excuse to launder its $20 million budget. In these cases, it’s heartening to watch the public push back on entertainment that doesn’t value their time. I’d often wonder who could possibly appreciate something like Disaster Movie (2008) when I’d pass a Redbox or dig through a bargain bin of DVDs. It turns out the answer is: no one.
Pen-and-paper letter-grading might feel anachronistic in a post-Twitter movie landscape dominated by streaming. Studios pay a base of $5,000–$10,000 per year to access CinemaScore’s data,though it’s unclear how much longer that revenue will remain stable. Apps like Letterboxd incentivize users to share their opinions on new movies far more quickly and in greater numbers than what CinemaScore can promise investors, and they share that information for free. Studios have changed their advertising approach, too. “The internet has changed the way people perceive marketing,” says Music Box Theatre’s Matt Cipolla. “It’s rare that I see a full trailer online, but [through ads on social media] I’m aware that the movie exists. I think that actually makes things easier for studios, because in some regard, audiences can form their own notion of what a movie is, and then project what they want to see when they ultimately see it.”
CinemaScore is a flawed system, one that conflates quality with marketability. But there is a crooked joy in curating such an exclusive list of derided movies—especially when so many of them have defied their grades. Reappraising CinemaScore’s failing class is not an exercise in elevating one’s taste above a public that didn’t know any better, but one of taking art back from the studios that didn’t know what to do with it. That satisfaction is only compounded when you’re able to revisit the movie in a theater full of strangers excited to take the same ride. CinemaScore hasn’t awarded an F to a movie since 2020, when both The Grudge and The Turning took home the honor. Cipolla and Marder seem playfully wistful about the lack of recent failures, as if the canon could soon reveal itself complete. “We’re dying for another movie to get an F,” says Marder. “We’ll be the first ones to see it.”
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