A Geeky Viewpoint

This was a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be.  I wanted to make sure my personal biases were some what tempered by the statistical data, yet not over powered. 

Before I ran the numbers I had notions of where movies were going to land, just not the exact order and generally for the most part the movies placement is fairly solid.

These Ratings include the following criteria.

• My Personal Placement
• Box Office -  Adjusting for inflation - 2014 Box Office Comparison - World Wide
• The Amount of Money Made and Percentage over Budget
• Critics Ratings (three sources composited together)
• Audience Ratings (three sources composited together)
• Over All Critics/Audience Rating weighting the Audience rating by Audience Response

My own personal placement of the movies was given 50% of the total score while the other 50% was a composite of the rest of the categories, all fourteen of them. 

However without going into detail some of the things I found.
My ratings vs. the other criteria, 9 movies were slotted more than 5 slots apart, 16 were slotted no more than 2 slots apart.  The Average difference between me and the composite score was under 1, so in general my list agrees with what "the average" person would say.   The exceptions are The Amazing Spider-Man, Ghost Rider, Iron Man 2, Spider-Man 3, The Wolverine, and Iron Man.   In most of those case I totally understand the difference.

I was slightly shocked when comparing budgets and profits that only two movies failed to recoup their budget costs in the theatrical release.  Punisher: War Zone and Elektra, with Elektra most likely breaking even with the DVD/Blu-Ray releases.   After listening/reading some much about how many of these movies bombed at the box office, it appears to be a myth since the average movie made 210% of what was invested into it by the studios.

The importance of the premium tickets is on the rise, at least for one franchise.

Critics vs. Audience Ratings.
Using a composite of three critics ratings and comparing them to three composite of audience ratings I found a real bell curve of scores.   50% differed by 3 places, 70% were within 5 places of each other.  
The three movies liked far more by the Audience than the Critics: Blade Trinity, X-Men, and Blade.   Interesting that for the most part its the older movies the Audience and Critics disagree with most at this end of the scale.   I suppose that with more technical savvy people involved in ratings with newer movies this drives up the score.
The five movies liked far more by the Critics than the Audience: Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, The Wolverine, Daredevil and Hulk.
Out of the ten movies on the Fringe (5 on either side) there were a couple of surprises, The Wolverine for example when you look at the numbers make sense, as it finished n the high side of the bubble with critics and low side of the same bubble with audiences, however I was totally shocked to see Spider-Man 2 finish so far apart between the audience and critics reviews, the fact it is the top Critical review and on the bottom of the audience top bubble, in other words both groups liked the movie, just the critics liked it more then the audience.

I was caught off guard by the total number of reviews, responses, and personal ratings for Spider-Man 3.   In looking at the three groups of audience ratings there are nearly 2 1/2 times the number of responses for Spider-Man 3 as the second most audience rated movie, which was Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.