The gulf between critics and audience has never been wider – just look at Melania’s Rotten Tomatoes score

Critics have given the Flotus flick 11% on the aggregator site, but the ‘verified ticket buyers’ score is a near perfect 98%. Fake views, or a sign of our politically disparate times?

If you’ve started to feel like you’re living in an entirely different reality from most of the world, there’s a good chance that it’s because you’ve been looking at the Rotten Tomatoes page for the Melania Trump documentary. There you will find two diametrically opposed numbers. First is the official Rotten Tomatoes score – the one aggregated across published reviews by professional critics – which sits at a minuscule 11%. But then there is the audience rating, which is based on scores from members of the general public. That score, incredibly, is 98%. (Admittedly, this is a score confined to “verified ticket buyers” – Rotten Tomatoes has another section it calls “All Audience” where the reaction is more … mixed.)

Of course, there has long been a chasm between public and critical opinion, which is why the film that won the most Oscars last year was a small character study about a disenfranchised stripper and the film that brought in the most money was about Minecraft. Even so, the disparity between the brutal reviews that Melania received (“The most depressing experience I have ever had in the cinema” – Mark Kermode) and the glowing public reviews (“Every red blooded American needs to see this movie to recognise the grace, sophistication and power of Flotius [sic]” – Jackie) is enough to give you whiplash.

Who could be wrong here? Is it the liberal press, relishing an opportunity to land a hit on an unpopular president by trashing his wife’s expensive vanity project? Or perhaps it’s the public reviewers who (and this is just wild speculation) have decided to flood the site with fake reviews in a coordinated attempt to undermine dissenting voices. Who could possibly say?

Either way, with an 87% difference between critics and the public, Melania will now go down in history as the film with the biggest gap between critical and popular scores. Nobody will be sadder about this than the people behind Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, which held the title until recently. Professional critics gave that film a lowly score of 16%, while its audience loved it enough to score it 84%. Prior to that, according to research by digital entertainment platform JB.com, the film with the biggest gap was 2024’s Emilia Pérez. Despite winning the jury prize at Cannes and gaining a 70% critical score, the film’s audience gave it just 17%. There are others. The 2021 Dwayne Johnson-starring Red Notice scored 37% with critics and 92% with the public. Saw sequel Jigsaw scored 32% with critics but 88% with the public. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin scored 83% with critics and 55% with the public.

Clearly, there are two biases going on here. The films that do better with audiences tend to be formulaic crowd-pleasers like Red Notice and Jigsaw. They exist to be familiar and unchallenging, qualities that critics historically dismiss. And who can blame them, since literally all they do is watch films. All they want to see is something to break the monotony of passable entertainment. A terrifying arthouse film about a sexy alien getting burned alive in Scotland is much more likely to do that than a Ryan Reynolds buddy comedy.

The other bias is that the films that did badly with the public – Emilia Pérez and Under the Skin – both have female leads. Which isn’t to say that the public hates women, but it is to say that an aggressively obnoxious quadrant of the public gets a bit weird when a film deals with women, or Black people, or transgenderism in any form. Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón got in hot water for a variety of reasons, but look at the films that have been review bombed in the past. Female superhero movies such as Captain Marvel. Female-oriented remakes like Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters. The Last Jedi, with its non-white female characters. The Little Mermaid with its non-ginger mermaid. There is a pattern to these things, and the pattern suggests that a lot of these public reviews – maybe, possibly, even Melania’s – are ideologically motivated.

You need to take both scores with a pinch of salt. On one hand, critics tend to lean highbrow, which means they’re likely to underestimate something designed to sit solidly with audiences. Conversely, people who leave reviews online for free are absolute weirdos.

But the gap is here to stay. You might have noticed that the gap between critics and the public is growing every year. Emilia Perez’s 53% gap in 2024 became Five Nights at Freddy’s 2’s 68% gap in 2025, which is now an 87% gap thanks to Melania. It’s impossible to imagine that this will ever be beaten – surely Melania was released in the perfect conditions for a percentage gap – but then again we’ve said that before. Perhaps one day something will come along to top it. A film made by someone genuinely contentious, dealing with a ferociously touchy subject that has caused people to lose their minds for thousands of years. A film that will start a legitimately tedious, all-encompassing, multi-stranded debate that will roll on for months and months until everybody loses the will to live. In other words: Mel Gibson’s The Resurrection of the Christ, this is your time to shine.