'Captain Marvel': Rotten Tomatoes Purges Over 50,000 Reviews After Review Bombing

Rotten Tomatoes just had to purge over 50,000 bad reviews from Captain Marvel.Not bad as in [...]

Rotten Tomatoes just had to purge over 50,000 bad reviews from Captain Marvel.

Not bad as in negative mind you, because that happens all the time and is part of the process. No, these were part of a "review bomb," illegitimate reviews intentionally aimed at lowering the score that can be affected by such a campaign, the Audience Score. This became quite noticeable once Rotten Tomatoes saw the overall number of user reviews for Captain Marvel sat at around 58,000, which is way above the norm for a movie.

To put that into perspective, Avengers: Infinity War had a total of 53,000 reviews over its entire run, and there is no way that many people have seen Captain Marvel after one day of release.

As you'll notice now, if you go to Rotten Tomatoes at the moment, there's a much smaller number of ratings, which currently sits at 4,567. Rotten Tomatoes has started going through its user-submitted reviews and have already purged 54,000 of them. We imagine this process isn't over, and it won't be the last we hear of it more than likely, but currently, the audience score sits at 36%.

Fandango president Paul Yanover recently broke down the changes they made after the first review bombing for Captain Marvel, switching up how they interpret anticipation rankings and not letting people submit reviews before a movie has been released.

"(The changes) are not simply a reaction to, 'Oh, gee, there's some noise created around (certain movies),'" Yanover told CNET. He said that some adjustments are looking to be "noise reduction," especially in regard to high-profile projects like Star Wars and Captain Marvel, which bring more trolls with them by nature, but that this is part of a long-term site strategy.

Since the changes were announced, Yanover has heard the claims that Fandango, who owns Rotten Tomatoes, has cut a deal with Disney to be nicer to its films. "None of (the site is) owned by Disney," Yanover said, adding that the idea of "some predestined arrangement between ourselves and Disney is completely untrue."

We'll have to wait and see if Rotten Tomatoes can make some changes to its user ratings as well, as this problem is going to continue with future films.

Captain Marvel stars Academy Award-winner Brie Larson (Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Ben Mendelsohn, Djimon Hounsou (Korath), Lee Pace (Ronan), Lashana Lynch, Gemma Chan (Minn-Erva), Algenis Perez Soto, Rune Temte, McKenna Grace, Kenneth Mitchell (Joseph Danvers), with Clark Gregg (Phil Coulson), and Jude Law.

Captain Marvel is in theaters now.

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