Rotten Tomatoes Blames Glitch for ‘Captain Marvel’ Review Controversy

In addition to becoming a tremendous financial success, it’s possible that Captain Marvel can add another accomplishment to its name, which would be rendering audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes completely useless. The film has seen the site undergo various updates to its format, with the site noting that a glitch in the system resulted in thousands of negative reviews being attributed to the movie baselessly.

Within hours of the film officially landing in theaters, Captain Marvel amassed tens of thousands of “reviews” from users, most of which were negative, resulting in a user review score of 35 percent positive rating. Rotten Tomatoes offered a statement admitting that an error in the functionality on the site resulted in comments posted before the film hitting theaters getting added to the user review score.

“We launched some changes to the movie pre-release functionality last week, which included not allowing users to leave a comment or review prior to a movie’s release in theatres. However, we still invite users to vote if they ‘want to see’ a movie prior to its release, and that vote total is displayed on the site,” the statement shared with The Hollywood Reporter read.

Including the comments and “reviews” posted before the film hit theaters, it earned more than 50,000 comments. For reference, Avengers: Infinity War currently has 53,000 ratings after opening nearly a year ago. Prior to the release of Captain Marvel, it became one of the lowest rated entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with visitors noting that many of the comments included sexist remarks. When Rotten Tomatoes noticed this trend and the obvious trolling on the movie’s site, they removed the functionality of leaving comments before a film was out.

“We have identified a bug in the post-release functionality for the movies that have released into theaters since our product update last week,” their statement continued. “The quantity of user ratings (which is displayed directly below the audience score and is intended to only include the quantity of users who have left a rating or written review after a movie’s release) had included both pre-release and post-release fan voting.”

Currently, the film is listed as having 7,000 reviews, yet many pages of reviews date all the way back to December of 2018.

Captain Marvel has 81 percent positive reviews from critics on the site and is tracking to earn upwards of $125 million domestically this weekend.

What do you think of this latest development for the film? Let us know in the comments below!

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