Works where you were surprised to learn you were in the minority of viewers

[Ionathus]

It is very rare nowadays that I watch a movie or read a book without knowing other people's opinions beforehand.
So, sadly, no "huh" moments.

I've been lucky to mostly experience the opposite. Part of this is because I've trained my friends over many years to not give me any spoilers or even many vibes about something they think I'd like to see, because they know I like experiencing most works totally blind. But also probably because I'm not plugged into a lot of "standard" advertising venues that would fill me in.

The last time I remember a "huh" moment was with The Mummy (1999). I thought was a barely passable Indiana Jones knock-off, and I assumed that was the general opinion. Only much later did I find out people actually liked it. And general opinion only seems to have improved over the years. Huh.

Oh, it's absolutely a fairly cheap Indiana Jones knockoff, and I feel like even people at the time (at least the adults -- I was a dumb kid ) knew it. But charm can do wonders for an otherwise mediocre movie. If the cast is good, or there are decent jokes, or if it even feels like the people involved had fun making it, that can really amplify the good aspects and make me overlook lazy writing or crummy special effects.

Edit: Oh, no, actually, a far more recent one: Thor: Love and Thunder.
I disliked Ragnarok, had no intention of watching this one, so I didn't bother looking up reviews.
Then my brother convinced me into the theater anyway, and I actually quite enjoyed myself. I thought it was a vast improvement over Ragnarok.
Reading the reviews afterwards was a "huh" moment for sure.

Interesting, I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone disliking Ragnarok but liking Love & Thunder! I never saw L&T myself as I was warned off it by someone who I trusted. Had you seen many other Marvel works recently? The overwhelming critique I heard about L&T was that it was way too "Marvel", and featured a lot of recurring tropes that had been overused in the MCU up till then. So one possibility is that those elements hadn't been played out for you.

Then again, maybe not -- I didn't see it myself so can't know for sure.

Oh, Hazbin Hotel is this for me. I had a buddy tell me it was great, watched the first episode, hated it, and...apparently the rest of the world is really into it.

Great example of how the perception of "popular opinion" can differ wildly: everything I've seen about Hazbin Hotel is that people don't like it. But it's possible I'm only getting that from niche sources that share my (and seemingly your) tastes.

I think that there are three broad groups who rate films.

1. experts/critics. These people are usually insane people who think they know more about art than other people, but are usually complete imbecils whose opinions only seems to actually matter within their own bubble. Unfortunately, they share that bubble with every other expert/critic and have filled the various awards groups with their own crazy members. Which is unfortunately why "award winning show" and "show I want to watch" rarely intersects.

2. fans. Also crazy people. Also convinced that they know better about the subject matter than anyone else. While they don't have the insider pull that the first group has, they can be ridiculously vocal and loud about their opinions and thus influence things (usually in crazy ways). There is also only rare intersections of "what the fans want" and what I consider to be good ideas/stories/whatever.

3. "real people". You know. People who just want a film to tell them a good story with good characters and a good balance of "things" in it (depending on genre of course) and do so in a way that makes sense, doesn't offend them, doesn't preach to them, and has reasonable production value and thought and competance in the production itself.

This reminds me of a great bit of advice from a writing workshop: "Any old schmuck can tell you what isn't working in your story. Nobody in the world can tell you how you should fix it."

Meaning: You have to meet the audience where they are. People don't need to be storytelling experts to have a valid opinion about the stories they consume -- the average person will pick up on the symptoms of bad writing, bad acting, bad editing...though they may not be able to articulate the source problem. In fact, you should always be wary of people who claim to know why something you made doesn't work, because they're usually wrong. I think that applies to both critics and fans (more egregiously with fans), and almost never with your "real people" third category: they don't bring preconceptions to the story, either about how to tell a "good" story (critics) or how to handle this story with the proper respect (fans). They're just there to have a good time.

That's not to say critics don't have their place. They're useful for pointing out trends. They're useful for industry knowledge and historical context. They're useful on a technical level, where they can point out the reason you didn't like something but couldn't find the words to articulate the weird filming trick that was being overused. But they're only a subset of the audience -- one that consumes orders of magnitude more content than the average audience member, and is thus much more likely to overreact to "clichéd" writing -- and it is definitely a mistake to treat their reviews as the definitive opinion on the work. The best critics approach their reviews as "here's what worked and didn't work for me."