How Zack Snyder's DC Films Compare to Other DCEU Movies on Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes was the bane of the early DCEU films directed by Zack Snyder, drawing scores that failed to match the expectations established by the Marvel Cinematic Universe's perfect record of Fresh reviews. The mixed reception of Man of Steel and downright polarizing response to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice were major talking points as the DCEU was finding its legs, and the latter's infamously low Rotten Tomatoes score has even been blamed as a reason for Justice League's production drama leading to Zack Snyder's replacement by Joss Whedon.
While the movies generated a strong core fanbase and performed admirably at the box office (falling short of the assumed $1 billion benchmark), the low Rotten Tomatoes scores became a focal point for the DCEU, especially after the first non-Snyder directed DCEU movie, Suicide Squad, scored even lower than Batman v Superman. The franchise saw an ever-increasing average with future installments before Snyder returned to release his original cut of Justice League, titled Zack Snyder's Justice League, which also saw a big Rotten Tomatoes bump from his first two movies. While canon and continuity are major question marks for the franchise (especially leading into The Flash's dive into the multiverse), for the sake of this comparison, we'll be looking at every DC movie released since Man of Steel, excluding the only explicitly non-canon movie, Joker (which has a crazy Rotten Tomatoes story of its own anyway).
Snyder is credited in some capacity in eight out of the ten films, including a writing credit on Wonder Woman, but we're only going to look at the films he directed, excluding Justice League due to the nature of that production and his lack of input on Whedon and WB's massive rewrite, reshoots, and final cut. Of Snyder-directed DCEU movies two are "Rotten" on Rotten Tomatoes with Man of Steel at 56% and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice at 28%, and then Zack Snyder's Justice League is "Fresh" at 71%. Altogether, their average Tomatometer score comes out to a Rotten 52%, the average "Top Critic" score is a Rotten 41%, and their average audience score is a Fresh 77%. Meanwhile, three out of the seven DCEU films not directed by Snyder are Rotten (meaning four are Fresh), with an average Fresh Tomatometer score of 65%, their average Top Critic score is a Fresh 61%, and their average audience score is a Fresh 74%.
The numbers get a little more interesting when we look past the Tomatometer to look at the actual critic score as opposed to the flattened binary thumbs up/thumbs down ratio represented by the Tomatometer. Snyder's movies average 5.97 out of 10 for all critics, 5.7 for Top Critics, and 4.03 for audiences (with the average thrown by Batman v Superman's 3.5, despite Zack Snyder's Justice League's DCEU high 4.7 audience score). The only non-Snyder DCEU movies with scores lower than his overall average are Justice League and Suicide Squad. Meanwhile, on the non-Snyder-directed end, we have a 6.29 out of 10 average review score from all critics, 6.13 from Top Critics, and 3.84 for the audience score. So, Snyder's average score is slightly below the non-Snyder average, while the Top Critic score for the other DCEU films blows Snyder's away, and then Snyder dominates the audience ranking, which seems consistent with his general reception as a filmmaker.
Converting these scores from an out-of-10 point system to a percentage to compare to the Tomatometer shows Zack Snyder's movies were getting slightly higher average critical scores than the Tomatometer represented, with an 8 point difference compared to the non-Snyder directed films. The films directed by other directors saw the opposite effect, with the Tomatometer averaging 2 points higher than the average score submitted by critics. This means critics submitted reviews for Snyder's DCEU films that were, on average 8 points higher than their respective Tomatometer, while critics submitted scores for the non-Snyder-directed films that were 2 points lower than their corresponding Tomatometer. This disparity only gets bigger when we look at top critics, where Snyder's average critic scores averaged 14 points higher than the Tomatometer, and Top Critic average scores for non-Snyder directed DCEU films was an exact match for the Tomatometer. Audiences, however, were far more consistent, giving the whole DCEU an average review score that was 3 points higher than the respective Tomatometer, Snyder or not.
For context, the MCU's average difference between critical scores for all critics and the Tomatometer is 10 points, with the number on the Tomatometer typically higher than the equivalent critic review. There was a smaller difference of 5 points for Top Critics, and then the audience scores are an exact match for their respective Tomatometer. While this pattern may look suspect to some, it's important to note that the disparity between the two scores only gets bigger at more extreme Tomatometer percentages, and the differences tend to be smaller the closer the Tomatometer is to 50%, so a lot of this may simply be the mathematical reality of Snyder's scores averaging lower.
One interesting outlier to note, though, is Zack Snyder's Justice League's Top Critic score is the only instance in the DCEU where a fresh-rated movie has a lower Top Critic Tomatometer than critical average Top Critic review score, with the actual critic scores averaging 7 points higher than the Top Critic Tomatometer. Between the DCEU and the entire MCU, only two other movies have their average critical scores for Top Critics underrepresented by the Top Critic Tomatometer like this: Thor: The Dark World (7 points lower), and The Incredible Hulk (2 points lower).
It's not clear why these three movies stand apart, but with Tomatometer scores in a similar ballpark, it's likely mostly due to one of the many quirks in the algorithm. In practical terms, those differences in score aren't very far out of line compared to the average for the MCU and DCEU, where both franchises have an average difference of 5 points between Top Critics' actual critical scores and the Tomatometer (although in opposite directions, with the MCU's Tomatometer averaging 5 points higher than critics and the DCEU's Tomatometer averaging 5 points lower, but again, this is consistent with the DCEU having a lower average score in general).
All reviews are subjective, and the Tomatometer is known for its wonky behavior, so while it's hard to draw any significant lessons from these numbers, it's best to chalk it up to quirks in the algorithm. Greater transparency in the numbers and a more comprehensive rating system might make the platform more valuable in this aspect, otherwise, the safest thing to say is that Rotten Tomatoes is a very imperfect system and sometimes the numbers are just weird.
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