Leave it to Michael Bay to turn something already big into something bigger. No, I’m not talking about the “life-size” IMAX version of Optimus Prime. I’m referring to the gap between critic and general audience tastes, often referred to as the “critic-audience divide.” We’ve already seen it get worse this year via terrible yet popular movies like Paul Blart: Mall Cop, but given the $201.2 million grossed by Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen over its first five days, we film writers are feeling the coming apocalypse soooo much more. Remember how last year we thought The Dark Knight made so much money so quickly due to the fact that reviews were so great? Eh, that probably wasn’t the truth after all.

Of course, a success like Transformers 2’s doesn’t exactly prove critics are worthless, only those who function simply as a thumbs up/thumbs down sort of recommendatory guide. Plenty of critics should continue to be worth reading if they’re otherwise good reads and create or allow for discussion without merely saying a film is good or bad. One of my favorite kinds of critic, for instance, is the kind that may turn me onto a film despite him/her having disliked it, as some scathing reviews of Transformers 2 have almost done.

A reader commented on my previous post about Transformers 2 with the claim that all our negative reviews helped the movie be so successful. If that’s the truth, maybe we should start using negative psychology and trash the great little films we really love. Or, we can just stop worrying about the majority audience liking different things as us and enjoy all the death threats we get from mainstream moviegoers when we disagree with them. Isn’t it often better for our sites’ traffic to stir up contention anyway?

Oh well, here’s another crop of critical whinery after the jump:
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