BTW: update on the Alita movie, it's doing pretty well so far, having hit the $350 million that FOX insiders originally said was the break-even point, after only 18 days of screening. That's already double the entire box-office take of Ghost in the Shell 2017.
Notably, the international take from Alita is only $50 million behind Transformers spin-off Bumblebee, which has a 2-month head start, so it looks like Alita is going to end up doing a lot better than Bumblebee internationally, if not in the domestic USA market. The difference in how the critics treated both movies seems ... odd.
I'm still not sure what exact bone those reviewers had with Alita that they don't have with ones like Bumblebee. However, if you look at the Rotten Tomatoes critics reviews for Ghost in the Shell, then you can see you could transplant those exact quotes into the mainstream reviews of Alita, and they're nearly identical in tone. I can assure you the movies are nothing alike. Basically, the likely scenario is that they went in expecting this to be another Ghost in the Shell fiasco and didn't review it at all objectively. They came in pre-prepared with a stock list of "manga movie criticisms" and just peppered them around. One example is critics trying to equate the "whitewashing" in GiTS with Alita, clearly not understanding the "set in Japan" / "set in the USA" distinction between the series. Alita was always set in the continental USA in the manga.
To give you an idea of the critics anti-Alita spin,
here's an article where the author acknowledges that Alita already made $350 million, but says that if Alita ends with $420 million (off a $170 million budget) it'll be "enough to avoid becoming an embarrassment" but then goes on to talk about LEGO Movie 2, which only made $150 million off a $100 million budget (despite having been out for longer), but not a word about
that being a flop or an embarassment, when it's clearly tanked and lost them a
shitload of money, putting any future Lego movies in jeopardy. So, even when Alita far exceeds expectations, they're still trying to talk it down by using glass-half-empty language like "avoid becoming an embarrassment" if it exceeds Fox's original expectations.