Yep. For sure. I had a period in life when I thought that my taste in movies, TV, food, clothing, etc was definitive since, after all, it was ME and I'm smarter than most people.
Somehow, neither life nor movies stayed that simple. Some reasonably intelligent people liked things that I disapproved of, not just the luddites and not-too-smart people.
So....the question of whether Orson Welles was the greatest or whether he was a self-important windbag that pulled a lot of wool over a lot of eyes, gets resolved how? I do not have the answer to this. I could ask the same question about other film geniuses but like any art form, people only get to be "right" by being "experts" and they mainly get to be experts based on other experts in a field of endeavor where there's nothing that can be determined by any objective means. Ergo.....Orson Welles is great because I say he is.
That's how you get to the cynical conclusion that the only thing that counts is the box-office.
I think the thing with Welles is that he may have been a bit too sophisticated for the audiences of his time. It may not have been immediately clear to the average moviegoer of the early 40s what was so great about Citizen Kane - or even why they should give two bits for a chance to watch it.
But it isn't just
Citizen Kane - movies as beloved today as
It's a Wonderful Life also did horribly in theaters when they were first released.
The bottom line, to a certain extent, is that sometimes perspectives shift with time.
Maybe there are recent movies that are horribly overlooked right now, but which decades from now will be regarded as masterpieces.
I try to keep an open mind with pretty much everything I watch. There's always a chance there was something during my first viewing that made miss out on some aspect of a movie that in hindsight deserved greater attention.
Take
Heaven's Gate - I didn't think much of it the first time I watched it, and I still don't think much about it after having revisited it over the weekend. I did notice that it seemed to look considerably
brighter than I remembered it - and when I tried to find out why, I found out that Cimino had wanted it to look brighter and more colorful when the film was rescanned for the 2012 Criterion reissue. But on the whole, I think the historical events depicted in the movie deserved a more thoughtful and precise approach to really do them justice.
That's just an example of a movie that literally looks different today, because the look of the movie was altered by the director (who was, perhaps, reacting a bit to the criticism that the movie received during its original theatrical release).
But aside from that one, it's hard to think of many examples where directors have meddled with their own work based on a critical backlash and come up with something that's definitely more audience-friendly... More often than not, it's far more common for a studio to take a director's cut and tamper with it to try to make it easier for the viewer to understand. It has happened with movies like
The Magnificent Ambersons and even Terry Gilliam's
Brazil.
The best we can do, at the end of the day, is work with whatever the director manages to get released to the public and work from there.