danny_boy said:

I have to agree with Alex here.

Saying that the majority dislike or hate the phantom menace is either misguided misinformation or deliberate disinformation.

These are from Box Office Mojo and Rotten Tomatoes respectively:

That makes it 11% less popular with audiences than Transformers 2 and on par with Hot Tub Time Machine with the critics.

I don't deny that people will feel nostalgia for ANH or ESB but I think they are acknowledged as being of higher quality and more culturally significant than the TPM (which has deserves to be made available in it's original form too).