For reasons both unknown and inexplicable, ‘Gran Turismo’ beats 30 MCU movies on Rotten Tomatoes and all but 4 on CinemaScore

The video game adaptation inspired by a true story may be heading for an underwhelming opening weekend at the box office, but apparently the people who have gone out of their way to see Gran Turismo don’t just like it; they absolutely adore it with every fiber of their being.

Neill Blomkamp’s coming-of-age racing thriller has somehow ended up scoring approval ratings on both Rotten Tomatoes and CinemaScore that outstrip almost the entirety of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s feature-length back catalogue, which is a development that nobody could have expected as the film revved into theaters.

Thanks to an audience score of 98 percent on the aggregation site, at the time of writing Gran Turismo is tied with Spider-Man: No Way Home and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, meaning that not only has it bettered 30 of the comic book franchise’s 32 installments to date in that regard, there isn’t a single one ranked higher.

On CinemaScore, polled audiences awarded the high-octane console-to-screen adaptation with an A grade. While that does put it level with 17 entries in the MCU back catalogue including its most recent offering Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, there are only four chapters in the never-ending superhero saga that landed an A+.

Those are The Avengers, Black Panther, Avengers: Endgame, and the aforementioned No Way Home, and there’s absolutely no shame in trailing behind those four behemoths. Did anyone expect Gran Turismo to be statistically designated as one of 2023’s most impressive crowd-pleasers? Of course not, but that’s nonetheless where we find ourselves.