Indiana Jones 5 gets slammed in reviews – but a new study says poor scores can mean big box office

Professional film critics are not enjoying “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” the long-awaited and reportedly final adventure for Harrison Ford as the whipping archaeologist.

Pre-release reviews for the picture have led to a 50 percent “rotten” score at Rotten Tomatoes, based on 46 reviews.

And the aggregation site Metacritic gives the new Indy a score of 52/100, based on 24 reviews.

But those failings could mean that “Indy 5” is becoming a runaway summer sensation – according to researchers at the University of California Davis.

The researchers examined 28,884 pre-release reviews and commentary for 448 films from the years 2015-2019, according to their paper in the peer-reviewed journal Marketing Letters. They then compared those critical hits and bombs to each film’s opening weekend box office.

The researchers called their subcategory of “out of touch” movie critics — whose tastes repeatedly ran counter to public tastes — “harbinger critics.”

“Interestingly, when these critics wrote positive pre-release reviews,” said lead author Pantelis Loupos, “they indicated the film was going to be a flop.”

“Conversely,” said Prof. Loupos, assistant professor of marketing and business analysis at UC Davis’s Graduate School of Management, “their negative reviews indicated that the film would be a success.”

“The stronger the sentiment in both directions,” Loupos said in a press release“the stronger the predictive signal.”

Two unusual examples found in their research were the highly commercially oriented franchise films Baywatch (2017) and Tomb Raider (2018). Both garnered critical acclaim pre-release, but turned in dismal box office returns on its opening weekend.

The researchers also double-checked their theory by conducting a second analysis of “sleeper” hits: 20 films from their data set of 448 films with poor opening weekends that went on to generate large revenues and critical acclaim over the long term.

Even with those movies, movies akin to The Shawshank Redemption and Children of Men, “harbinger critics,” proved even more out of sync with public opinion, with their pre-release reviews having even more reverse predictive power.

But what Loupos and his UC Davis team really wanted to understand was why. What makes these critics so far removed from mainstream tastes?

Even with commercial “big studio” movies, including the 2017 Baywatch reboot (above), pre-release praise from ignorant critics proved a clear predictor of an opening weekend dud

The researchers then looked at 20 ‘sleeper hits’ from their dataset of 448 films. Sleepers, like 1994’s Shawshank Redemption (above), only earn top dollars and accolades after opening weekend. But here some of the top critics studied were even more out of touch with public opinion

Using the text analysis software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), the researchers looked for signs of similarity or differences in the writing style of their “harbinger critics.”

They found that the critics whose tastes least matched public opinion tended to write in a more formal and analytical manner. These critics were also less likely to frame their reviews as personal opinions, and used fewer self-referential pronouns.

“This indicates that harbinger critics show an overconfidence in their abilities,” the researchers write, “while non-harbinger critics are more self-reflective about public opinion and express more confidence in their reviews.”

This pattern persisted even among top critics, suggesting that trusting the movie experts would be a big mistake for Indy fans.

“This surprising outcome challenges the prevailing belief that positive reviews equate to better box office earnings,” Loupos said.