Oh, absolutely - seeing commentary before the movie seems a sure fire way to destroy the authentic emotional experience of the art. And there is absolutely also a tendency to stretch art analysis way past breaking in some academic circles, seeing symbolism in everything, psychoanalyzing the author's choices etc (Michel Foucault had a joke from one of his characters - 'read Freud enough and you'll end up believing that a penis is nothing more than a phallic symbol').

Still, in pop culture and the mass market, I think the scales are tipped well to the side I'm mentioning. One interesting case study has been the movie Annihilation - a very obviously symbollic film, but one which has often been reviewed almost exclusively in terms of it's world (what were the alien's plans? Was that the real Lena at the end?), especially if you look at places like YouTube.