Star Wars: New Study Names The Last Jedi One of the Most Divisive Films of Last 40 Years

If you thought Star Wars: The Last Jedi is one of the most divisive films released in the past half-century — it turns out you might be right. Now well over two years after its release, fans still can’t stop debating about the Rian Johnson film; in fact, one new study suggests it’s one of the most divisive films of the past 40 years. The study from RaveReviews.org places The Last Jedi at fifth place on their list of “The Most Divisive Films of All Time,” behind Knock Down The House, Hannah Gadsby: Nanette, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, and American Outlaws.

The premise of the study is relatively simple — it compares a movie’s Critics Score and Audience Score from Rotten Tomatoes. Whichever movie has the highest difference between the two scores on the review-aggregating site made its way to the top of the list. In the case of Knock Down The House, a documentary about rising political star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a whopping 82 percentage points separated its perfect 100-percent Certified Fresh Critics Score and its 18-percent Rotten Audience Score.

Admittedly, the study isn’t an iron-clad scientific experiment conducted in an underground lab thousands of miles away — though it does provide some interesting insight into the discrepancies between critics and casual movie-goers over the years. The Last Jedi is joined by just one other genre film in the list’s Top 10 — Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids (2001) ranks seventh. A ways down the list, Antz makes the list as the 14th most divisive film to hit theatres.

Despite being an argument point between fans and critics, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker scribe Chris Terrio says The Last Jedi is a gift to the franchise. “That was a great gift of The Last Jedi, in that their relationship seems very intimate and specific,” Terrio said in a previous interview. “There’s a way in which, in The Last Jedi, Rey and Kylo Ren interact, and they just seem like they’re part of the same whole, that spiritually, they’re really one person. That really helped us in thinking about Rey and Kylo Ren, which is to say that we wanted to elaborate on the idea that Snoke bridged their minds in The Last Jedi.”

He added, “But what we wanted to say is that there’s something deeper there and leave it to debate about at which point they became this dyad in the Force, where they were really two, or were they one, whether that was a mistake that Palpatine made by bridging them and therefore creating this thing. But regardless, their relationship is extremely interesting and complicated, and it was one of the things that J.J. and I loved about The Last Jedi that we luckily inherited and could build.”

Naysayers of the feature might want to buckle in for the ride, Johnson confirmed as recently as January that his trilogy is still in the works.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is now streaming on Disney+.

Where would you rank The Last Jedi amongst other Star Wars films? Think it over and let us know your thoughts in the comment section!