By Miles Surrey | Bloomberg Opinion

An artist taking to social media to vent about how their work is being received has become a familiar ritual in the entertainment world. The latest installment came last weekend, when filmmaker Taika Waititi reacted to his newest film, Klara and the Sun, earning the worst reviews of his career. The movie also flopped at the box office.

In an Instagram post, Waititi described critics as "sad lost souls who couldn't achieve their dreams of becoming artists" and declared them "irrelevant" and "out of touch."

The claim carries a historical wrinkle: critics have gone on to become successful filmmakers — most notably François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Éric Rohmer of the French New Wave. His own previous films, meanwhile, have benefited from positive reviews. And although his post insisted that the critics covering Klara and the Sun are the "same people who also hated Jojo Rabbit," that film holds an 81% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes — a sign that he appears more fixated on dissenting opinions than on the consensus viewpoint.

Setting those contradictions aside, the less obvious irony in Waititi's gripe is what it reveals about the enduring relevance of professional critics despite the various challenges they face. There is an impulse to dismiss the importance of reviews altogether, but if critics' judgment did not matter, it would not elicit angry outbursts.

Artists lashing out at critics over negative reactions to their work is a frequent occurrence. In 2019, Lizzo tweeted that critics who don't make their own music "should be unemployed." After 2016's Suicide Squad earned negative reviews, actress Cara Delevingne dismissed critics as "really, really horrible" at the film's London premiere, arguing that the movie was made for the fans. Marketing campaigns sometimes go on the offensive as well: after the 2018 crime drama Gotti was universally panned, a sizzle reel claimed that critics had "put out the hit" and that audiences loved the film — a claim that Gotti's Rotten Tomatoes audience score suggests otherwise.

A recurring theme in these rebukes is that critics are out of step with the public: who needs positive reviews when what really matters is what fans make of an artist's work? That mindset, however, also feels out of touch. In October, the Economist examined more than 10,000 film reviews from Metacritic spanning 20 years to determine how often critics and audiences actually diverge. The data revealed that critics and moviegoers are generally in agreement, and that by 2025 their assessments were more aligned than at any point since 2005.

There is still a kernel of truth in the attacks against critics: professional reviews no longer hold the same influence over what people choose to watch. YouTube and TikTok creators outranked professional critics as the sources likely to influence whether audiences will see a movie in theaters during opening weekend, according to a 2025 study by the National Research Group conducted in collaboration with the Wrap. Additionally, a 2026 YouGov study found that just 18% of men and 14% of women consult review sites when deciding which TV shows to watch, compared with 47% of men and 53% of women using social media.

The same dynamic is evident in music. According to a 2024 Deloitte Digital Media Trends study, 82% of Gen Z and 70% of millennials discover new artists and music through social media or user-generated video sites. In the words of Ed Sheeran: "Why do you need to read a review? Listen to it."

The industry-wide decline of arts criticism has taken a toll as well. In 2024, Condé Nast folded Pitchfork into GQ, undercutting an influential bastion of music criticism. Last year, Rolling Stone laid off Alan Sepinwall, one of the country's most prominent TV critics. As publications reckon with declining revenues and evolving consumer habits, full-time roles for critics have become scarce — a reality that, as a culture writer, hits close to home for the author.

These factors are genuine challenges for critics. Yet their cultural authority within the industry has not faded along with them: the growing scarcity of independent critical voices has arguably made their endorsements more valuable to studios, networks, and artists.

Consider Drive My Car. After winning the top prize from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Society for Film Critics, it became the first Japanese film nominated for Best Picture, in 2022. While critics are not Oscar voters, it is hard to separate the film's history-making achievement from the groundswell of critical support that preceded it. Meanwhile, Joel Stillerman, AMC's former president of original programming and development, cited the outpouring of critical enthusiasm for helping the network's tech drama, Halt and Catch Fire, earn a third-season renewal in 2015 despite low ratings.

Pitchfork's music criticism, in particular, has proven capable of moving the needle. In 2021, guitarist Yasmin Williams was nearly ready to call it quits on her career when her album, Urban Driftwood, received a positive review on the site. She credited the review with generating more attention for her work and told the Associated Press in 2024 that musicians are worried about Pitchfork's future because of the trust it commands.

Influencer events and celebrity interview podcasts may create buzz, but they cannot completely replace this kind of validation. Regardless of the medium, artists cannot dictate a professional critic's judgment — which makes critics' verdicts both hard to ignore and even harder to supplant.

— Bloomberg Opinion