[Galactus]

I don't really buy that critics will always give TMNT bad reviews. In the past few years there's been a huge increase in critics lauding the kind of movies that would previously have confounded them.

The reason for this is that a new generation of movie critics have come into the profession that are of the age to "get" comic book movies and have gotten into prominent positions for their nerd cred since basically that's the dominant genre by far. If there's any point in history that TMNT wouldn't just be instantly be written of as trash it's now; it just has to be a good TMNT movie.

True, audiences tend to be more forgiving than critics. For me the friends that I went to see the 2014 movie didn't care for it but didn't think it was quite the travesty I did but kinda liked the snow chase scene.

One thing that stuck out to me is that they all "could see what they were going for" but didn't quite get there. I found that attitude much more prevalent with movie apologists online. While a lot of stuff like Eric Sachs and learning ninjitsu from a book was garbage it's fair to say not every idea the movie put forward was bad but they were certainly executed badly. I think a lot of people the movie's defenders could see that and were "willing" the movie series to do better with these ideas.

Plus a lot of these people saw things that just were not there. I had tons of conversations both here and other boards with people who were convinced Splinter's comment about not remembering anything prior to being in the lab meant we were going to get Hamato Yoshi and Oroku Saki backstory in some way, the comment about the mutagen being from space was clearly to set up that Shredder had some connection to Krang and whole mythology was subtly being laid out. They knew the first movie wasn't the best but now they've ironed out the problems the sequel will redeem all this promise.

In many ways it reminded me how DCEU fans were (sorry Leo) with some being denial (critics are all paid off by Disney) and others grudgingly acknowledging that while the Snyder ones were not good somehow, someway it will all work with next Snyder DC movie and then the next.

Y'know I wonder if that somehow factored in to Out Of The Shadows failure. If you to some degree were optimistic about this new vision of TMNT and the mythology you thought was being built and you see that sequel goes a complete 180 and jettisons all that and is just a movie for kids you might give up on it too.