Turning Red is Pixar’s Biggest Critic/Audience Split in Rotten Tomatoes

Turning Red is Pixar’s newest critical hit with 95 percent of reviews rating it “Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes, but its audience rating gives it Pixar’s biggest divide between critics and audiences. Since Toy Story in 1995, Pixar has made a total of 25 animated films, landing big Rotten Tomatoes scores for nearly every one of them.

Pixar’s brand of fun, creative animated movies with an emotional heart that resonates with both children and adults has maintained an impressively consistent streak of releases for nearly three decades without getting too formulaic or seeing a significant drop in quality. Through both popular franchises like Toy Story or The Incredibles, as well as its one-off originals like WALL-E or Inside Out, Pixar has consistently raised the bar in quality.

Related: How Turning Red’s Rotten Tomatoes Score Ranks Against Other Pixar Movies

Turning Red is the last of Pixar’s brief focus on only original films following Toy Story 4, including Onward, Soul, and Luca, before Lightyear, despite not being a part of Toy Story continuity, still marks a return to one of their existing IPs when it arrives later this year. Turning Red‘s 95 percent Rotten Tomatoes score would be the envy of any other studio, but with its lower Audience Score, how does its split between critics and audiences compare to the studio’s 24 other movies?

Turning Red is Pixar’s 14th Ranked (Despite Above-Average Rotten Tomatoes Score)

Pixar’s average Rotten Tomatoes score for every feature film released by the studio is a whopping 89 percent, meaning Turning Red‘s 95 percent score comes in 6 points above average, but even so, it doesn’t even rank in the top half of Pixar’s lineup. Impressively, Pixar has 14 total films with a 95 percent Rotten Tomatoes score or higher. Turning Red is one of three movies tied at 95 percent (alongside Soul and WALL-E), but with its 8 out of 10 average rating being the lowest of the three, Turning Red ranks just 14th out of Pixar’s 25 movies.

Of course, Turning Red ranking 14th against Pixar’s other movies isn’t a remotely bad thing considering the stiff competition. The reason its score is above average but ranked so low is because 18 Pixar movies have a Rotten Tomatoes score higher than 90 percent, but the average is brought way down by Cars 2, Pixar’s only “Rotten” rated movie, with a 39 percent Rotten Tomatoes score.

Turning Red Has One of Pixar’s Lowest Rotten Tomatoes Audience Scores

Turning Red‘s 95 percent Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score may land it in the middle rankings of all other Pixar movies, but the Audience Score ranks much lower. The movie currently only has a 73 percent Audience Score after 2,500 audience scores submitted, which is nine points lower than Pixar’s Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score average of 82 percent. Turning Red doesn’t have Pixar’s worst Audience score, but there are only three movies with lower scores: Cars 3 with 69 percent, The Good Dinosaur with 65 percent, and Cars 2 with 49 percent. Cars 2 is the only Pixar movie with a Rotten Audience Ccore, though, so while the others are all below the Pixar average, they still saw a largely positive reception from viewers.

Due to the combination of a high Rotten Tomatoes critic score and low Audience Score, Turning Red also has the highest split between critics and audiences of any Pixar movie with a difference of 23 points, passing The Incredibles, which has a 22 point difference (97 percent versus 75 percent). The average Pixar movie sees a separation of just eight points between the Audience Score and the Critic Score and 19 of Pixar’s 25 films have a separation of less than 10 points, meaning this isn’t a common issue for Pixar reviews.

It’s not totally clear why Turning Red‘s Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score is so much lower than other Pixar movies, but given the movie’s focus on a young girl entering puberty, including references and depictions of many of the most awkward elements of that stage of life, is a little different from other Pixar movies. While Pixar has a reputation for leaning into many of the complicated emotional realities of life, it’s not entirely a different approach for the studio, but most people are more uncomfortable with frank depictions of puberty than they are with family drama, dealing with grief, or any of the other topics typically tackled by Pixar. The movie handles it all tastefully, but there are some topics people actively try to avoid talking about in their daily lives, and Turning Red is a little less shy in that regard (which is arguably the whole point of the movie tackling this story in the first place)

How Turning Red’s Critics vs Audience Rotten Tomatoes Split Score Compares to the MCU

Of course, when compared to any franchise other than Pixar, Turning Red‘s Rotten Tomatoes scores fare far better. For example, compared to the MCU, which is the only other franchise with a track record comparable to Pixar’s in Rotten Tomatoes, Turning Red‘s 95 percent Rotten Tomatoes score comes in 11 points higher than the MCU average of 84 percent. Turning Red‘s Rotten Tomatoes score is higher than every single MCU movie except for Black Panther, which sits at the top with 97 percent.

The MCU’s 83 percent Audience Score in Rotten Tomatoes is still higher than Turning Red, also an 11 point difference, but the Pixar movie would rank slightly higher against the other MCU movies. It’s tied with Ant-Man and the Wasp and Thor: The Dark World at 75 percent, but there’s four more movies below that, including Captain America: The First Avenger (74 percent), Iron Man 2 (71 percent), The Incredible Hulk (70 percent), and Captain Marvel (45 percent). The average MCU movie also only sees a 6 point average split between the Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score and the Audience Score, but Turning Red doesn’t have a bigger split than every single MCU movie, since Captain Marvel‘s 34 point split and The Eternals‘ 31 point split are quite a bit bigger. Otherwise, the next biggest split in the MCU is Black Panther with a 17 point difference. Otherwise, 23 of the movies in the MCU have a split of less than 10 points and 18 movies have a split of less than 5 points.

Ultimately, Turning Red got great reviews from critics and mostly great reviews from audiences, so combined with its huge Disney+ debut, the movie is a big success. While the split between critics and audiences is significant, especially compared to other Pixar movies, it’s merely a quirky outlier. Audience enthusiasm may not have hit the high bar set by other Pixar movies, but the high Rotten Tomatoes critic score is just as responsible, so a split between critics and audiences of this nature should never overshadow Turning Red‘s overall positive response from both Rotten Tomatoes score categories.

About The Author

Stephen M. Colbert
(627 Articles Published)

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Stephen has been writing for the site since 2016 and enjoys all manner of movies and TV, especially when it gives reason to obsess over minor irrelevant continuity minutiae.

Stephen has been infatuated with movie magic on screen and off since wearing out his VHS copy of The Making of Star Wars when he was 7. This passion continues in his work as a film journalist, whether it’s hunting down breadcrumbs about the Snyder Cut, breaking down box office trends, or obsessing over Rotten Tomatoes data, Stephen lives in the minutiae, as listeners of his podcast, Batman v Superman: By the Minute (with fellow-Screen Rant editor Andrew Dyce) know all too well.

When he’s not writing on the site, Stephen can be found obsessing over vintage camera lenses, chasing his tiny children around, or getting himself into trouble on Twitter @smcolbert.

Yes, that’s his real name.

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