I assume by "we" you mean the general "we" of the American movie-going public who paid to see the movie and enjoyed it back when it came out and not the specific "we" of the people on this board, at least half, I'd be willing to bet, are not fans of the movie and never were. For myself, I avoided it like the plague when it came out as the hubristic & bloated (though very shiny) piece of disaster-movie turd it seemed and only recently caught a large chunk of it on late-night tv --a situation only imaginable since I've mellowed with fast-approaching middle age and now actually deign to pay to see first-run Hollywood blockbusters instead of the foreign films, art movies, and direct-to-video b-movies I preferred 10 or 15 years ago.
Personally, I was kind of excited when I saw the trailer for TITANIC. I thought it was going to be a quirky Buckaroo Banzai-esque movie only I would really like.
"Whoa, a disaster movie with the retard from GILBERT GRAPE as a leading man, plus the Phantom himself? This isn't going to make any money, but it'll sure be fun!"
I'm generally seldom right about "calling" movies based on trailers. I thought TARZAN AND THE LOST CITY was going to be the new ROCKETEER. Boy, was I wrong. Casper van Dien is like an evil store mannequin, and when he tries to smile it is the stuff of nightmares.
But yes, I mean "we" as the general moviegoing public. Though it helps if the people I'm talking to never liked TITANIC at all, because then they're familiar with the "are you freaking kidding me?" feeling when TITANIC won every Oscar. Which ASS's recent Eisner award is giving me deja vu.
The more I think about, the more I hate the egocentrism present in today's comic fans; i.e. "If I don't like this comic then it must be bad! If other people like it then they're ignorant or stupid!" These fans feel the need to spread their views to others, like a meme, in a futile attempt to make their views the dominant ones. Even when they're praising something else they'll likely take a shot at the thing they don't like. This is because they do care what others think, but this will never be admitted because it's considered a sign of weakness to care about what others think. This is why you'll often hear the phrase, "I don't care what you think" in response to criticism. Of course, if they truly didn't care then they wouldn't need to respond in the first place. The fact is that they do care, often times they care too much.
Sweet sassy molassy, if passive-aggressiveness was an Olympic event, this post would get the Gold easy.
It's all really a lot simpler than all that.
Q: Why do people express their opinions on the internet?
A: Because it's the INTERNET.
Other than that, here's my response:
1) People DO get their opinions from other people. There is a climate that produces opinions, which people do get swept away with like a wave.
An example would be "Don Heck is the worst artist working in comics." You saw this in lettercols; people in stores groaned when Heck was put on their favorite book, etc.
And why? Now that Heck is dead, and enough time has passed from when he was an active force in the industry, the culture that said "Heck is the worst artist ever" has died out. And what happens? You now have a whole generation of people that are able to look at Heck's work and see its strengths.
2) It's illustrative to look at something like ASS and compare it to more favorable things. Because Johns and Busiek do right what Morrison does wrong, for instance.
3) The reasons people say they enjoy ASS disturb me, smack of a willful self-deleusion and self-deceit, and SHOULD be argued against with reason and sanity. For instance, the idea that ASS is the story of "Silver Age Superman," despite all evidence to the contrary. The idea that Morrison is restoring the Silver Age when he is really misrepresenting it and its strengths in order to have a sarcastic, insincere self-awareness that is ultimately mean-spirited and denigrating to the character.