Internet trolls displayed such a strong presence on Captain Marvel's Rotten Tomatoes page that the site updated its protocols in regards to user submitted comments. Now that the film is in theaters, their various approaches to make people happy has only continued to anger a majority of its visitors.
Prior to a film's release, users were able to weigh in on whether or not they were looking forward to seeing it. Captain Marvel's audience anticipation score was curiously low for a Marvel Cinematic Universe film, with visitors noting how many comments were being left which contained sexist remarks. Another Disney film, Star Wars: Episode IX, also began to accumulate sexist and racist comments.
Rotten Tomatoes' response was to deactivate the audience anticipation feature, admitting that they had detected a trend of trolls swarming these pages to skew data. This seemingly solved the issue, though the film being released in theaters caused a new set of complications.
The release of the film reinstated all of the negative comments that were posted ahead of the film's release, as these were now considered "reviews" under the site's formatting. To the casual viewer, it appeared as though Captain Marvel had accumulated more than 50,000 reviews, with the percentage of positive reviews sitting in the 30s.
In hopes of correcting the issue, the site purged roughly 50,000 user comments, whether they be positive or negative, seemingly in hopes of correcting the work done by trolls before the film was released.
Few metrics about a film are as pointless as user ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, as the audience anticipation for a film is really only of value to a movie studio. Despite how meaningless these data points are, some users are frustrated that negative reviews have been reinstated, others are frustrated that reviews have been logged which are clearly the work of bots, and other users are frustrated that the site has deleted reviews for any reason at all.
Scroll down to see all the ways in which Rotten Tomatoes is frustrating the internet.