Why do people exclusively go by the word of mouth of friends? Some of the friends I have hate Nolan's batman films. Not surprisingly, they didn't think much of TDKR. For example, I've gone 4 times to see it. The amount of people I went with total 16. Out of 16, 13 liked/loved it. Now, would I claim this as a sample consensus of all the people who went to see TDKR? No-it's ridiculous. Same with co-workers and family. I'd say even those who were initially put off from seeing it, ended up in favor of it. But I can't claim that the rest of the nation feels the same or different. Those we know personally are a small sampling. Unless you have hundreds of friends. Or, unless you went down the aisle after every showing and asked everyone in the audience what they thought, you can't get an accurate representation. However, I find it funny that people are willing to claim Cinemascore, IMDB, any online poll in favor of TDKR inaccurate, while they are likely to hold it in high regard if a movie they liked skewed positively. A friend of mine who is a bigger fan of Batman/Nolan than I am tracked twitter/tumblr like a madman after the first showings in NYC were through. As I looked at the twitter feed myself, the amount of praise for the movie outweighed any negatives or underwhelmed reactions by a long ass mile.