"I work for the people" — what Taika Waititi's Rotten Tomatoes defense actually reveals

Taika Waititi's film of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun opened to a visible gap: professional critics rated it poorly, the box office confirmed their skepticism. Waititi responded the only way available to a filmmaker who has lost both audiences simultaneously. On social media, he called critics "obsolete" and pointed to Rotten Tomatoes audience ratings. Were significantly higher than the critical score. He works for the people, the argument went, not for sad lost souls in press rows.

This move has the shape of a modern defense, but it is not new. What changed is the infrastructure. Before 2015, when Rotten Tomatoes made audience ratings algorithmically visible and searchable, a filmmaker citing audience preference over critics was claiming something unmeasurable. Now it is a number, and numbers are harder to argue with.

George Lucas blamed Empire magazine critics in 1980 when The Empire Strikes Back received a mixed reception upon release. He was furious — the film was not the immediate classic he knew it would become. But he never claimed audiences rated him higher than critics did. He simply waited. The film endured. Cultural consensus shifted. Lucas did not need a metric to prove his righteousness; time did it for him. Uwe Boll, conversely, cited IMDb user ratings in 2005 as vindication for his video game adaptations after they collapsed at the box office. The audience scores were real. The vindication was not. Boll is now forgotten, and his films have not been reappraised.

The pattern is not complicated, but it is not comfortable either. Waititi employed a tactic that only exists because Rotten Tomatoes gave it a form — but that form does not predict anything. It provides comfort. A filmmaker who has failed with both critics and audiences can now point to a third measure and claim victory there, turning a binary loss into a three-way split. The audience score becomes not evidence of different taste, but evidence of a different universe where this filmmaker's work mattered.

What this reveals about us is that we are hungry for permission to dismiss expertise without actually dismissing expertise. We want the validation of numbers without the weight of judgment. When you find yourself citing user ratings against professional criticism. Whether about a film, a restaurant, a book, or your own work. You are not resolving the disagreement. You are choosing a scoreboard where you are winning. The scoreboards keep multiplying. The question is whether any of them matter after the moment passes.