As of this writing, I do not know if the film Suicide Squad is good or bad. In the week leading up to the film’s release, the only people who had watched the movie were film critics, and the majority of those had a distinct lack of kind things to say about the project. Lots of films get bad reviews, and while this did have a fair amount of pre-release optimism, especially after some very well received trailers, I personally wasn’t surprised it wasn’t a critical darling. Like all films, it could have gone either way.
Some people were in shock that this film didn’t receive much of a critical reception. Someone was so incensed that the reviews were largely negative that they circulated a petition to shut down film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, which merely repeated what their list of film critics thought of the picture and published it. They circulated conspiracy theories that critics were bribed to give Warner Bros. and DC films bad reviews by rivals Disney and Marvel. Why Disney and Marvel would be all that concerned with the box office take of Suicide Squad is a mystery – they didn’t have anything opening against it, and their own films have made enough money that they don’t have to worry very much about the rivals across town. While there have been cases of invented or purchased reviews from film studios – Sony was caught red handed making someone up to pretend A Knight’s Tale was worth watching – that generally involves studios building themselves up, not tearing others down. It doesn’t make financial or logical sense to pay for bad reviews of a film.
On the face of it, this makes no sense. Why were people so invested in a film that had not, at that time, been released? It’s far from the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last, but why does it keep happening? What reasons are there for people to be so invested in what amounts to entertainment? The answer, strangely, is in sports.
People like their team to win, the purest example of this is in sports, where literal teams are playing actual games, but the sports game attitude spills out into other arenas. It has infected politics, it has infected consumer goods and, in this case, has infected entertainment. The people who are angry at bad reviews of Suicide Squad are not actually angry about the reviews of the film. They’re angry that their team is losing. They have aligned themselves with DC comics as their entertainment team, they’re going to watch films that DC makes, watch TV series’ that they produce, play their games and read their comics. DC is to them what the Roughriders are to a Saskatchewan resident.
While a sports team has the game score, a film team has box office numbers. If you want to declare a winner during the box office season you’re going to have to have the team that sells the most tickets, that gets the most people watching and has the best reviews. Reviews are not always going to influence the box office take, especially for a film with a built in audience and a highly effective advertising campaign, which Suicide Squad represents.
The difference, and one that is kind of important to remember, is that it’s not actually a competition in this case. In sports, it matters if you beat the other guy, because if you don’t you’re not going to be as well placed in the playoffs and you’re not going to take home the championship. Your team winning will, by definition have the other team losing. It matters, because there is an actual competition happening. In film, it actually doesn’t matter. If Disney and Marvel make a billion dollars on a film, they’re happy, it doesn’t matter if a different film in the same genre makes $1 or $1,000,000,000. They might study what does or doesn’t work with the other film, try to avoid making the same mistakes or try to understand what works, but all that will be to meet their own bottom line. They don’t care whether the other guy succeeds, because it doesn’t matter to them at all. So long as their movie makes money that’s the only important thing. If people are at the theatre considering going to Suicide Squad they’re going to see promotional materials for Disney and Marvel films, so the studios would probably prefer it if audiences decided to go out this weekend and see it rather than stay home.
The people who are angry at the film’s poor reception have applied the logic of sports to a field that is completely different. Entertainment is competitive in many ways, but it’s not a direct competition. There isn’t a winner or loser here, just a bunch of different people who want their own projects to succeed. In this case, critically, one hasn’t, but that happens plenty, it’s far from the first anticipated film to get critical drubbing. Film is not a collection of sports teams, it’s not win or lose, it’s a rare case where nobody cares who does the best so long as they get your money too.
