Once highly anticipated, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is officially one of the worst-reviewed big-budget movies of all time.

The film maintains a 44/100 score on Metacritic and a 29 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating. Hundreds of critics have verbally pillaged the movie. Perhaps most vicious was Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, who wrote that "humankind deserves a better blockbuster." In a YouTube video that has already cemented its place in internet lore, leading man Ben Affleck dons a thousand-yard stare as he learns of this critical response for the first time.

Even so, Batman v Superman has been a huge hit: It earned $424.1 million worldwide in its opening weekend — good for the fourth-highest opening of all time — and set all kinds of box office records. As of this morning, that figure has increased to an estimated $682.8 million.

This is not atypical. Critics have hated a lot of recent movies that have been huge hits in the theater. Modern audiences seem to take little stock in the rasping thoughts of movie-chair pundits.

Still, we were curious: Among these top-grossing films, which received the absolute worst reviews, relative to the amount of money it made? And where does Batman v Superman fall on this spectrum?

The search for the worst blockbusters in history

We began our hunt at Box Office Mojo, a site that tallies how much money any given film makes (a.k.a. gross revenue). Using worldwide, inflation-adjusted figures, we compiled the 600 highest-earning films of all time. (Note: Batman v Superman is already No. 84 on this list.)

Then we turned to Metacritic to determine the critical response for each film. Metacritic compiles reviews from established movie critics and, using its own weighted formula, creates a composite review score for each film. These scores are on a 0 to 100 scale (0 representing unanimous disgust from critics, and 100 resounding acclaim):

In the graph below, each red dot represents one film. To see where previous blockbusters fell, we've marked a few for reference.

At a glance, it would seem that Grown Ups 2 — a 2013 "comedy" starring Adam Sandler — is the worst-rated, highest-earning movie of all time. But this doesn't tell the full story. Movies on our list range from $212 million to $3.2 billion in gross; though Grown Ups 2 flaunts an abysmal Metacritic score (19), it ranks relatively low in the box office compared to other top earners.

Remember, we wanted to determine which films have received the worst reviews relative to how much money they made. So we created our own ultra-scientific metric: money per point, or the total a movie grossed in the box office divided by Metacritic score. This tells us how much money a film made for each review point it earned; as such, movies with a combination of a low score and high revenue gravitate toward the top.

For this list, we made the cutoff a Metacritic score of 50 or less, which, in the rating system of Metacritic, represents anything below average.

The results:

Astonishingly, the Transformers franchise takes a clean sweep of the top three spots — in historical order, to boot: Age of Extinction (2014), Dark of the Moon (2011), and Revenge of the Fallen (2009). Following closely are the third and fourth films from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

Only two weekends into its theater run, Batman v Superman is already ranked 21st here. The film has far surpassed the only other superhero flick on the list — coincidentally, 1997's Batman and Robin — and will only continue to climb in tandem with its revenue.

But there seems to be a bigger trend at play here: 30 of these 50 films (60 percent), were made within the past decade. The original 600 films we looked at went all the way back to 1972's The Godfather — yet very few of the older films seem to make it on this list.

What's the deal?

Are big-budget films getting worse?

Four of the top 10 films on our list can be credited to big-budget film director/producer Michael Bay — a man whom David Denby of the New Yorker once described as "stunningly, almost viciously, untalented." In addition to the Transformers series and Armageddon, a fifth film of his (Pearl Harbor) ranks 31st.

Bay is a key player in what some critics call the "artistic cheapening" of the blockbuster, or using CGI technology and flashy gimmicks to make up for a lack of plot and engaging dialogue.

Most of today's big box office hits fall into this camp — and the majority are not well-received by people like Denby.

But there was a time when blockbuster hits and gnarly critical reviews did not go hand in hand. We went back to the numbers from our original list of the 600 highest-grossing films of all time (adjusted for inflation), and averaged the Metacritic scores for each decade. The outcome is not promising.

In the 1970s, blockbusters (the original Star Wars, Superman, Jaws) generally earned the respect of critics. This support has since dramatically waned with each decade: Today, the average blockbuster secures only a 57 Metacritic rating — a decline of 33 percent from 40 years ago. There is no longer a correlation between box office popularity and critical acclaim.

This might partly be attributed to the rise of what film writer Ryan Lambie calls the "landfill sequel" — or Hollywood's semi-recent trend of pumping out incredibly lucrative part twos and threes that add scant artistic value and do little to build on a storyline. On our list, 52 percent of poorly rated blockbusters are sequels (or, in the case of Alvin and the Chipmunks, "Squeakquels").

We're seeing an increase in producers attempting to create franchises out of films that probably don't merit one. The Hangover, for instance, garnered favorable reviews (73 on Metacritic); instead of calling it a day, Hollywood milked out two more, each with a subsequently lower score (44, and 30, respectively). Yet both were box office successes.

For now, one of these franchise sequels, Transformers: Age of Extinction, retains its spot as history's worst-rated, highest-grossing film of all time. And like a brooding, jagged-winged little mammal, Batman v Superman is within striking distance.

Note: We've posted our full-data set below in case you'd like to take a look through it for yourself. It includes the 600 highest-grossing films of all time, and can be sorted by gross (adjusted for inflation), Metacritic score, year, or our own metric, $/point.