Probably worth mentioning as well that even if you’re not a fan of the ST, the last two movies got 93% and 91%. So even if you weren’t personally expecting it to be good, it wasn’t unreasonable that most would suspect it’d be in the same ballpark as the last two.
It wasn’t unreasonable, but at least to some of us, the critics ratings didn’t tell the whole story.
My point is that regardless of how you think you’ll feel about it and how you think non-critics will receive it, it wasn’t unreasonable to suspect that it would get a high RT score, because the last two films did.
DrDre said:
Additionally, not everyone’s expectations for this film’s quality, or its reception were very high.Again, I’m not saying expectations for quality needed to be “very high.” High 70’s/low 80’s isn’t “very high.” But there’s a big gulf between even low 70s and where it is (53)
That gulf is a big reason why it’s earnings are where they are. Expectations didn’t need to be “very high” for the reality to be jarring, and for that jarring reality to negatively affect the box-office somewhat significantly.
I didn’t expect it to get into the high 70s, low 80s. I expected it to be in the low to mid 60s. While it came out a bit worse than that, I would not have expected the film to have done much better, if it had a 65% RT score.
To my point, unless you predicted the film would be significantly worse than TFA and TLJ, I’m not sure why you would think it would score that much lower than those two, which you already don’t think are good.
Because I felt there was a danger, JJ and Disney in general would want to please everyone. Like they say, if you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. After Palpatine was introduced as the big bad, I also expected the film to be rather heavy on fan service, and Star Wars tropes, and to thus be more in line with TFA, backtracking somewhat from the direction TLJ took the story, which I felt would not go over well with many critics.