When you’re looking for a new movie to watch, checking out what the critics can say can be helpful, if not definitive. But a lot of the time, what critics enjoy and what general audiences enjoy don’t line up. And then sometimes, the critics get it so wrong that you wonder why anyone ever listens to them about anything.
That’s what we’re talking about today: movie classics that, for whatever reason, were torn to shreds when they first came out.
The Shining
Proud Razzie award nominee
The Shining is now considered a classic horror movie with lots of iconic moments to its name: the blood pouring out of the elevator, the creepy twin girls, Jack Nicholson axing through the door… But at the time, critics were lukewarm to negative on this movie, calling it dull, slow, and lacking in scares. The Shining even got a couple of nominations at the Razzies, a parody award show that gives out statues for designation like “Worst Director” and “Worst Picture.”
The movie was based on a book by Stephen King, and a lot of critics thought the novel was better. The author himself has admitted to not liking the film, although it’s ironically become arguably the most enduring and beloved of the many movies and shows based on King’s work.
- Release Date
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June 13, 1980
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Jack Nicholson
Jack Torrance
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Shelley Duvall
Wendy Torrance
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Scatman Crothers
Hallorann
The Big Lebowski
That’s just, like, uh, your incorrect opinion, man
The Big Lebowski has been a cult classic for over a quarter century. There’s an annual festival celebrating the movie. There’s a religion called “Dudeism,” in honor of the laid-back lead character, who prefers to go simply by “the Dude” (Jeff Bridges).
So it might surprise people to learn that when the movie first came out in 1998, not only did it underperform at the box office, but critics had no idea what to make of it. A lot found it to be meandering, unfocused, and disjointed. They thought it was kind of funny, but in a smarmy way. Many compared it unfavorably to Fargo, the Oscar-winning crime film that had come out a couple of years before and served as the breakout hit for directors Joel and Ethan Coen. Looking back years later, Jeff Bridges himself remembers feeling disappointed: “I was surprised when it didn’t get much recognition,” he said. “People didn’t get it, or something.”
The critics weren’t exactly wrong: The Big Lebowski is disjointed and meandering. It’s basically about a guy who wanders from one mishap to another. But that’s exactly what people love about it. Fans of this movie will quote it ad nauseam, so even if critics didn’t get it at the time, history did.
Metropolis
Set in 2026!
The oldest film on our list, Metropolis, was a German movie that came out in 1927. It prophesied a grim dystopian future where society is sharply divided between the haves and the have-nots, where technology is advanced enough to create robots indistinguishable from real human beings.
All of these themes would recur in many movies to come, so obviously, the film had a huge influence. But critics at the time were not impressed. Variety enjoyed the visuals, which have proven equally influential, but thought the story went nowhere. “Too bad that so much really artistic work was wasted on this manufactured story,” they wrote. Sci-fi legend H.G. Wells was unimpressed, dismissing the movie as “silly.”
Well, we’re still talking about Metropolis a century later, so those critics might be embarrassed if they were alive.
Vertigo
Negative reviews for Veritgo are psycho
These days, when film nerds look back at the best movies made by director Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo almost always makes it into the top five and often takes the number one spot. But when it came out in 1958, critics weren’t so kind, calling the film slow, thin, and not up to Hitchcock’s usual standard. Where’s the action? Where’s the suspense?
Vertigo is indeed slower than some of Hitchcock’s other classics, but over time, that started to be seen as one of the movie’s biggest strengths. Vertigo is about a man (James Stewart) who falls in love with a woman he’s paid to follow (Kim Novak), only to see her die. He later meets a woman who looks suspiciously like her and starts making her over to resemble his lost love.
It’s probably the closest the famously obsessive Hitchcock came to letting viewers peer into his soul. The movie’s slow burn was lost on some critics at the time, but is celebrated today.
- Release Date
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May 28, 1958
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James Stewart
Det. John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson
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Kim Novak
Madeleine Elster / Judy Barton
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Barbara Bel Geddes
Marjorie ‘Midge’ Wood
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The Thing
Here’s the thing about The Thing…
The Thing is a 1982 horror movie about a group of research scientists on a base in Alaska. Their home is invaded by a creature that can take the shape of those it kills. Suddenly, it’s impossible to know friend from foe.
Director John Carpenter took this terrific setup and turned out a movie that’s now considered one of the finest horror films of all time. Lots of writers and filmmakers have cited it as an influence on their work.
And yet, when it came out, this movie was lambasted by critics who thought it was too bleak and nihilistic—as if that’s a negative in horror. (Critics initially dinged Fight Club, another movie that went on to have a fierce cult following, for the same point.) Even weirder, while many were impressed with the now-legendary practical effects, plenty maligned them for being too gruesome and bloody, which seems like another crazy complaint to make about this sort of monster movie.
At the time, critics seemed unwilling to meet The Thing where it was. But it proved them all wrong by becoming a cult classic.
2001: A Space Odyssey
This tends to happen to Stanley Kubrick movies a lot
Today, 2001: A Space Odyssey is considered an unimpeachable classic that pushed filmmaking to the next level and gave us a look into our own futures. With generative AI growing by leaps and bounds, is it really that crazy to imagine a real-life HAL 9000 computer could exist soon?
But at the time, critics were baffled by this slow-moving, arty space opera. Why were there so many scenes with no dialogue? Why was the ending so ambiguous? Movie star Rock Hudson walked out of a screening saying, “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?”
Enough people have figured it out. A Space Odyssey is now considered one of the deepest, densest science fiction films ever produced, and rightly so.
9 reboots of classic movies that are actually worth a watch
These reboots surpass the originals, bringing a whole new take on the films you already love.
- Release Date
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April 10, 1968
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Keir Dullea
Dr. David Bowman
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Gary Lockwood
Dr. Frank Poole
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William Sylvester
Dr. Heywood Floyd
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Douglas Rain
HAL 9000 (voice)
Judge for yourself
Again, I think critics are a useful metric when deciding whether to check out a new movie or show. The key is to find one or two who share your taste and stick with them. But even then, there’s no guarantee they’ll get it right, which is kind of exciting; who knows what modern flops are new classics in the making?
