
“Unfortunately, we have seen an uptick in non-constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling, which we believe is a disservice to our general readership,” Rotten Tomatoes said in a statement on the site. In addition to restricting users’ ability to leave ratings, the site will also disable comment functions before a film’s release date. The new Rotten Tomatoes changes, of course, apply to unreleased movies. But the audience score was often cited in news articles as evidence of the film’s massive unpopularity-despite the fact that the metric is easily manipulated and not necessarily reflective of how most viewers felt about a movie. Certainly, there was legitimate debate among fans involving The Last Jedi’s characters and story lines. In 2017, Star Wars: The Last Jedi was pilloried by unhappy viewers who drove the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes audience score to 44 percent it was still the highest-grossing film of the year by more than $100 million. These efforts don’t even always affect a film’s box-office performance.

Review-bombing campaigns, which are run by a small (if loud) sliver of online fandom, don’t factor much into the larger cultural conversation around a movie.

In the case of Captain Marvel, many online commenters seemed upset by Larson’s forthright remarks in interviews about how she hopes to increase diversity in the blockbuster world. It’s become common to see online backlashes to female-led blockbusters-most notoriously with the 2016 iteration of Ghostbusters, but also with films such as Ocean’s 8 and even projects that never exited development. Many culture writers noted that Captain Marvel, in particular, was likely being targeted for featuring a female hero. Different groups organize campaigns to drag down the audience rating for a film (or a game) in response to a particular controversy, sometimes for sexist or racist reasons. The poor grade is the result of “ review bombing,” a practice that’s also widespread in the highly charged world of video gaming. But Rotten Tomatoes is just trying to stem the tide of organized campaigns against movies.Ĭaptain Marvel hasn’t hit theaters, yet it garnered a dismal audience score of 54 percent-far below the totals for other recent Marvel movies. In response, an angry segment of superhero-movie fandom claimed that the site’s changes amounted to censorship.
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The announcement came less than two weeks before the highly anticipated March 8 release of Captain Marvel-the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to center on a female superhero (played by Brie Larson). Rotten Tomatoes’ decision proved to be just that. Why would people even need the opportunity to weigh in on something that hasn’t been screened to anyone except critics? But this is the internet in 2019, where any benign pop-culture topic is a potential powder keg for online discourse. This might sound like the most logical sort of adjustment.

Read: The Atlantic’s review of ‘Captain Marvel’
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Then, on February 25, Rotten Tomatoes announced a series of changes, the most significant of which is that fans can only rate or review a movie once it’s come out. Until last week, any site user could leave a review and rating for a film before its release date, something that would affect the movie’s “audience score” (though not the official critical score that determines whether a film is labeled “fresh” or “rotten”). But on Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregating website that wields serious influence over many theatergoers, that rule was broken all the time. In the world of film criticism, there’s one inviolable rule: You can’t offer an opinion on a movie you haven’t seen.
