Disclaimer - This post contains no spoilers.

After catching the midnight showing of Batman V Superman couple of nights ago, I had a thought. The thought was, "is it possible to form an opinion of a film without reading a review?"

It occurred to me that so many people now use reviews as a basis to watch a film. This gives critics, film journalists and, to some extent, IMDb users an incredible amount of power. To some degree, these people are the deciding factors of many people wanting to watch a film.

Link Between Reviews & Box Office Performance?

There have been many films over the years that have suffered by the hand of the aforementioned. That's not to say bad box office performance is directly related to critical reviews, but there's definitely a correlation. Read this interesting essay for more on this.

The article cited above suggests the best way to gain a good box office performance is through the quality of its marketing and filmmaking. That makes sense, right? The best way to achieve critical and financial success is to make a kickass film and market the shit out of it.

The fact is, reviews do serve a purpose - to inform us, the comsumers, about the quality and coherency of a film amongst other factors. But it's now getting to the point where moviegoers are relying on these reviews to form an opinion. Yes, this is a broad generalisation, but all I've heard the last week is how bad the reviews for BvS are. This shouldn't make a difference to you. Watch it yourself and see how 'bad' a film is or how awesome it is. Opinions differ, and films change.

There's no rule to say what reviews should be used for, but they shouldn't be used as a basis to form an opinion on something you haven't experienced yourself.

Batman V Superman

Before I continue, I want it on record that 1. I was behind Affleck as Batman from the start. 2. I thought BvS was great. I went into it knowing full well the reviews weren't exactly favourable, but this didn't sway me. As I said in last months' Movieville Podcast, the trailer showed us a good chunk of the best bits, but the film is about how they got to those bits.

As a part of Movieville's new 'initiative' if you will, there won't be a 'review' of BvS, at least, in the traditional sense. For this post, I'll mention that I thought the film was brilliant. I've read a number of reviews that critique BvS from a technical standpoint, but none of them acknowledge the film for what it is - an almost literal translation of the associated heroes' comics. This is what was great about this flick - it was all for us - the most loyal of fans.

It was an awesome setup for the future of the DC universe and is a huge step in the right direction for comic book films. I'll no doubt talk more about this on my Twitter/Anchor accounts in the weeks to come.

One more thing - and this won't be a popular opinion - I thought it was better than The Avengers flicks.

I'd love to hear your opinions on this - do you use reviews as indicators as to whether you should watch a film or not? I'd love to know. Drop me a line on Anchor
or Twitter.