As Joe Bardi pointed out last week: The critics really, really hated Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Even Peter Travers hated it — the same Peter Travers whose effusively positive blurbage from Rolling Stone is a staple of movie ads. The avuncular Roger Ebert didn't pull any punches, either: "A horrible experience of unbearable length," he called it. And Joe himself begged viewers not to subject themselves to ROTF.
But subject themselves they did, in box office record-breaking numbers. In a story in today's Washington Post, Dan Zak acknowledges that summer blockbusters have always survived in spite of critics, but observes "there's something astounding about the gap between Transformers' voluminous receipts and excoriating reviews."
This article appears in Jul 1-7, 2009.