There's Just No Accounting for Taste

So I've been gone for a while, but I'm off the sports beat for the summer and thought I would start occasionally posting my thoughts on politics and popular culture again here. To get us back in the swing of things, I thought I would start, in my usual curmudgeonly manner, with another head scratcher regarding human tastes in the popular culture landscape of today. 

We do know that some of the biggest franchises and stars are essentially immune to bad reviews these days, particularly by the now paramount measure of opening weekend box office. In fact, one could well argue that the critics and average moviegoers have diverged more and more over the years as the quality of Hollywood mainstream films has arguably declined while dedicated franchise audiences have proliferated (and really kept the business profitable). There has always been a tension between critics and moviegoers on this point, with the former more likely to want beauty and a message in their films and the latter more likely to want to be entertained and empowered by what they watch. Critics understand that film is about desire, at least some of them, but it is audiences that often unknowingly are going to the movies to have that desire sated in the formulas that have now worked for almost a century. So that divergence is understandable, though moments still arise when the distance becomes hard to reckon with. 

One such space is the Adam Sandler universe, where a "comic" personality like Laurel and Hardy before him, leaves the critics cold while continuing to bring in huge audiences. His latest foray into the critically panned but successful film is Murder Mystery for Netflix. According to the streaming site, an incredible 30 million people watched the film over the weekend, which, at $9 a ticket, would have brought in the third biggest opening weekend ever ($556 million). 

There is, apparently, a tinge of Agatha Christie (once the best selling author in human history) in the story, which mostly revolves around "clever" dialogue between Sanders and Aniston, but that is not enough to explain that sort of an "opening weekend." Instead it might be that the familiar is becoming more and more appealing as we work our way through the most abnormal political moment in American history. Or that a fan base once solidified, will keep buying your popcorn, even if they know there are better brands one or two shelves down. But maybe, most of all, it just reminds us of H. L. Mencken's point that "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."