Rotten Tomatoes Reveals the True Ups and Downs of Ben Affleck's Career
Ben Affleck is one of the most active actors working today, and the Rotten Tomatoes scores for the movies he's appeared in showcase the many ups and downs of his career. His movies have run the entire spectrum of the entire Tomatometer, earning him 39 different scores from 50 movies, landing at least one score in every set of ten from 0-100, but his ability to consistently appear in at least one critically praised movie every few years (and his multiple Oscars) keep his name from being too tainted by his critical reception.
Ben Affleck originally broke onto the scene in the early 1990s, appearing in a string of well-reviewed movies before winning his first Oscar for Best Screenplay, shared with Matt Damon, for Good Will Hunting. He then appeared in a slew of movies across many genres, seeing a string of negative reviews as he also became a popular target for paparazzi and Hollywood gossip. He eventually pivoted to directing, where his films were met with critical praise, earning an Oscar for Best Picture on his third directorial effort, Argo. Since then, he's seen more ups and downs but also put out some of the best acting work of his career, appearing in fewer films and being more selective about the projects he joins.
While there's a lot of subjectivity in Rotten Tomatoes scores, and they don't always reflect just on the quality of the performance, especially in a few notable cases for Affleck, it's one of the easiest ways to get a high-level view of a career like Affleck's. Taking a look at how each of his films was ranked over time gives some interesting insight into the career of one of Hollywood's most popular, sometimes polarizing figures.
One of the first things that jumps out about Affleck's career viewed through the lens of Rotten Tomatoes is that critics and audiences don't agree on his best films or even which decade of his career is best. Everyone's Rotten Tomatoes scores agree Good Will Hunting is his best overall (98 percent from critics and 94 percent from audiences) and both rank Dazed and Confused as his 3rd best movie (92 percent from critics and 90 percent from audiences), critics rank Argo second (96 percent), Shakespeare in Love fourth (92 percent), and The Town fifth (92 percent), while audiences rank Zack Snyder's Justice League second (94 percent), Argo fourth (90 percent), and Gone Girl fifth (87 percent). Both critics and audiences put the same movies at the bottom two, with the infamous Gigli getting six percent from critics and 13 percent from audiences and his recent Netflix movie, The Last Thing He Wanted getting five percent from critics and 13 percent from audiences.
When it comes to the best decade of Affleck's career, critics and audiences both rank the 2000s the lowest, with an average score of 49 percent from critics and 50 percent from audiences, and both rank the 2010s next, with 57 percent from critics and 64 percent from audiences, but they disagree on which decade is his best. Critics rank the 90s at the top with a 62 percent average Rotten Tomatoes score and the 2020s (so far) as second best with 60 percent average, but audiences rank the 2020s at 68 percent average and the 90s as second best at 67 percent average. Overall audiences are much more fond of him, though. The average Rotten Tomatoes scores from critics in each decade of Affleck's career barely gives him two Fresh averages (the 1990s and the 2020s), but audiences ranked him Fresh on average in every decade except the 200s.
Affleck's career is full of ups and downs, but when it comes to Rotten Tomatoes scores, 1998-2004 was especially brutal. He appeared in three movies every single year during that stretch other than 2004, where he only appeared in two. It still included a few highs, such as Shakespeare in Love earning 92 percent, but out of that 20 movie stretch (40 percent of his entire filmography), only five were rated Fresh, with an average of 44 percent for the entire time period, which includes both Gigli and his first superhero role in Daredevil. Excluding the five Fresh rated films (Shakespeare in Love, Dogma, Boiler Room, Daddy and Them, and Changing Lanes, averaging 78 percent), the 15 "Rotten" rated movies only averaged 33 percent.
However, that string of critical bashing, particularly for Gigli, resulted in one of the biggest bright spots of his career: his turn to directing. Starting with Gone Baby Gone in 2007 (which he didn't act in), his first three directing credits (including The Town and Argo) averaged 94 percent, with Argo also winning Best Picture before Live By Night became his first critical misfire at 34 percent, despite praise for the film's visuals and performances. His pivot to work behind the camera didn't only result in better critical reception for movies he directed but also saw him choosing better acting roles and even improving as a performer. His average Rotten Tomatoes score slides all the way down to 52 percent in the years before he started directing, but sees an immediate reversal and slow uptick in the years since.
One of the most fascinating parts about Affleck's acting career is that his high points and low points seem to come in waves. He started off in the 1990s with a hot streak strong enough to make any actor jealous with seven films averaging 80 percent in Rotten Tomatoes including three films over 90 percent and another at 87 percent. Only one film in that stretch doesn't have a Fresh score in Rotten Tomatoes, and that's Kevin Smith's Mallrats, which has gone on to become a cult classic. Over the next decade, he appeared in 24 films, only seven of which have Fresh rating in Rotten Tomatoes, only to then hit five Fresh movies in a row with an average score of 80 percent, culminating with his Best Picture win for Argo. Ironically, Affleck saw another slump after Argo, averaging just 42 percent for his next seven movies (only one of which is rated Fresh), only to swing back again with his most recent stretch of films.
With the release of The Last Duel, his rolling average peaked at 63 percent, although it's largely held down by the 5 percent score from The Last Thing He wanted. However, even excluding that, his average at the time would have been 76 percent, showing just how impressive it was for him to put together a string of five movies averaging 80 percent two other times in his career (technically three, since he maintained the 80 percent rolling average from Good Will Hunting to Shakespeare in Love). After The Tender Bar, his five-movie rolling average stands at 60 percent, and even if his next movie (likely The Flash, unless Disney decides to finally release Deep Water) hits 100 percent, his rolling average will be just shy of hitting that 80 percent mark again, although the numbers themselves are fairly arbitrary (and don't always reflect on his performance specifically), his recent string of performances in movies like The Way Back and The Last Duel speak for themselves.
Ben Affleck still has a lot of movies left in him, so who knows what his ultimate legacy will be, but any actor could only dream of having one of the hot streaks he's had. The fact that he's gone from high to low and back again, reinventing himself each time, shows great resilience. He has a few projects announced but says he wants to focus on smaller roles that don't take him away from his kids until they graduate high school, so the next phase of his career could be yet another sort of re-invention before he surely evolves again for yet another phase.