What is the definition of both commercial and critical success?

A

AmateurFilmmaker

What is commercial success? What is critical success? Which is valued more? How is either achieved? Evaluated? Which would you rather have for a feature film? If a "commercial success" means earning more money for ones work, that sounds pretty valuable and important to me :).

Maybe others disagree, but to me earning a large amount of money for a project is a good reason to make it as well as "passion". Even "passion projects" need money to be made/need to earn money in order to resource their purveyor with money to make as many as he'd/she'd like.
 
Commercial success = the movie makes a profit
Critical success = crititcs, peers and 'artlovers' like the movie. In other words: it is 'officially' deemed 'good' by respected media and people.
 
Well, the main problem is that, sure, you can say, "I'm only pursuing commercial success?" or "I'm only interested in making a critically successful film." However, there is no blueprint to either.

As William Goldman said, "Nobody knows anything."

Many people have a problem with the screenwriting guru, Robert McKee, but one of things he said once has struck me as true, (I'm paraphrasing.)

"There are different types of stories, arc plot, minimal plot, anti plot, etc, and although the arc plot accounts for most of the movies made by Hollywood, there are great commercial and critical successes in all of these types of story. Masterworks that the world treasures. Now, you will find that you will have a natural affinity somewhere in this triangulation of different types of stories. The types of films you want to make, that you have a passion for, will place you naturally in a certain coordinate. The mistake a lot of people make is trying to write the types of movies they aren't really passionate about because they believe it will bring them greater commercial or critical success."

However, he also pointed out: "The further you move away from the arc plot, the smaller your audience gets. It is just inevitable. This is because the arc plot is not only the story type we are most used to, it is because we are hard-wired to respond to it. It is the way that we interpret our own lives and the events in them and has been since the beginning of time."
 
A movie can achieve critical success without commercial success, and vice versa. A critical success is positive reception from the viewers and press, such as good reviews and rewards. A commercial success is high amount of sales, read viewership. Critical and commercial success are both defined by the general public, the collective.
 
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