Rotten Tomatoes Shuts down Captain Marvel Trolling

Rotten Tomatoes has announced that it will now disable audience reviews for unreleased movies. The move is intended to reduce what the site calls “non-constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling, which we believe is a disservice to our general readership.”

This comes after Captain Marvel, a film that hasn’t even premiered, was bombed with negative reviews following comments made by the movie’s star, Brie Larson, regarding feminism in the movie. She also asked for more diversity on her press tour. In response to her comments, those who were angry with her views let their feelings be known via Rotten Tomatoes.

“We are disabling the comment function prior to a movie’s release date,” Rotten Tomatoes announced in a post on Monday.

“We have decided that turning off this feature, for now, is the best course of action. Don’t worry though, fans will still get to have their say: Once a movie is released, audiences can leave a user rating and comments as they always have.”

But that’s not the only change that Rotten Tomatoes is making. The popular site announced that it is also making changes to its “Want To See” feature.

As of February 25, we will no longer show the ‘Want to See’ percentage score for a movie during its pre-release period. Why you might ask?  We’ve found that the ‘Want to See’ percentage score is often times confused with the ‘Audience Score’ percentage number. (The ‘Audience Score’ percentage, for those who haven’t been following, is the percentage of all users who have rated the movie or TV show positively – that is, given it a star rating of 3.5 or higher – and is only shown once the movie or TV show is released.)

This is what users will now see once a film has been released:

Rotten Tomatoes believes that these changes will help prevent the review bombing that we have previously seen. It’s no secret that this has been an ongoing issue for a few years. Last year, some DC fans tried to organize a group to review bomb Black Panther a month before its release. There were also so many issues with 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi that some of the actors even left social media.

It’s often difficult to discern which reviews are legitimate and which aren’t. In cases like this where the film hasn’t even been screened for the press, it’s safe to assume that the reviews aren’t real – somebody has an agenda. I don’t care what that agenda is, if they haven’t seen the movie, I don’t want them reviewing it.

I like this change. A lot. It’s good to see Rotten Tomatoes making moves to curb this type of behavior. I really hope that it works.

What do you think of the changes? Let us know in the comments below!