One Of The Most Ambitious Cinematic Experiments Ever Has A Perfect Metacritic Score

In 2025, IP remains king. As the age of the superhero blockbuster appears to wane (unless Marvel truly can fix their ailing cinematic universe before it’s too late) studios are turning to other existing properties to sell movie tickets, with video games looking like they could become the next major font of inspiration for Hollywood — although “Borderlands” becoming the biggest bomb of 2024 doesn’t bode well. Still, if video games don’t work out, you can bet studios will find something you already know and repackage it, even if that something is literally already a movie.

It would be patently silly to write off all projects based on existing IP as being inherently bad. But we are clearly in a golden age of repurposing things that really shouldn’t be repurposed. Case in point: the Harry Potter reboot series which seemed like a tipping point for our nostalgia-obsessed monoculture when it was announced in 2023 (alongside a threatened “Twilight” reboot). This is why, when a truly original idea comes along, it’s nice to see it rewarded.

We don’t always reward original ideas with our attention. It took a streaming platform for “The Creator,” one of the most ambitious sci-fi movies of the decade to finally find an audience. But then, just because an idea is original doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. In the case of Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” however, not only was the idea good, we actually did pay attention. In fact, we paid enough attention to make it one of only a few films to garner a 100 out of 100 score on Metacritic, making it the best-reviewed film of this century to date on the platform.

Like all good ideas, the concept of “Boyhood” is simple without being simplistic. Written and directed by Richard Linklater, the film follows Ellar Coltrane’s Mason Evans Jr. from the age of 6 to 18, turning his adolescence into a tale as sweeping as any blockbuster spectacle. The kicker is that Linklater actually shot the movie across 11 years, bringing back Coltrane and his co-stars to create a film that follows the same characters played by the same actors as they age across that time span. Co-starring Patricia Arquette as Mason’s mother, Olivia Evans, Ethan Hawke as his father, Mason Evans Sr., and Linklater’s own daughter, Lorelei, as his sister, Samantha, “Boyhood” is a truly moving portrait of childhood and adolescence that garnered stellar reviews upon its 2014 release.

So stellar were those reviews that “Boyhood” now bears an impressive 100 score on Metacritic. What makes this particularly impressive is that, unlike Rotten Tomatoes, which due to its not entirely coherent percentage system maintains there are only two “perfect” sci-fi movies, Metacritic’s Metascore actually allows for some nuance in the overall rating of a movie. Rather than a binary between “Fresh” and “Rotten,” the Metascore is based on what the site describes as a “weighted average of reviews from top critics and publications.” That is, the site’s curators actually take the scores given by critics and convert them to a score out of 100 (for those reviews without a score, curators assign a score they deem fair based on the sentiments of the piece).

All of which is to say that 100 on Metacritic is a different thing entirely to a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and actually means critics gave the film perfect marks. As such, Linklater can be genuinely proud of his achievement with “Boyhood.”