Group Of DC Fans Attempting to Sabotage ‘Black Panther’s Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score

Black Panther may be one of the most eagerly anticipated movies this year, but not everyone wants to see the latest entry of the Marvel Cinematic Universe succeed. There are some who actively want to see it fail.

Specifically, a group of DC fans want to see Black Panther fail so much that they’ve put together a plan to sabotage the film. A group has made an event on Facebook called “Give Black Panther a Rotten Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes” that is encouraging people to go onto the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes and deliberately give the Marvel film an artificially low score. The event, which as of the time of this article has nearly 2,000 people on board, is in response to what the creators claim was Disney planting bad reviews of or paying critics for negative press for DCEU films.

“Given the massive success of the audience review rigging on the Rotten Tomatoes site for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and due to the sudden rise in those disgruntled with Disney business practices among other factors especially due to the corporate manipulations which created falsified bad press for the DCEU, I feel that it’s time to strike back at all those under Disney and bring down the house of mouse’s actions for paying off the critics that hurt DC Comics on film and for other parties affected by them,” the event description reads.

The organizers also state that they intend to create similar events for every future Marvel offering — including Netflix series — in an attempt to “truly make a difference.”

While the idea of fans deliberately launching an attack of false negative reviews on a movie — particularly Black Panther, the first black-centered superhero story in the MCU — is disappointing, it honestly brings back into the spotlight the idea that Rotten Tomatoes scores might not be particularly accurate. The idea that Rotten Tomatoes scores could be gamed came up during Star Wars: The Last Jedi‘s first weeks in theaters with the critical score being significantly higher than the audience score leading some to believe that fake audience scores had been submitted. A similar suggestion was made about the disparity between Justice League’s critical score and audience score as well, though in this case audiences were kinder to the DCEU film than were critics.

Interestingly, Down with Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys, the group currently pushing this hate campaign against Black Panther, claims to have been behind the negative response to Star Wars: The Last Jedi as well, claiming to have used bots to create multiple accounts for the sole purpose of rigging the score.

However, even if the group does manage to dent Black Panther‘s Rotten Tomatoes rating is only a small measure of a film’s true performance. At the end of the day, ticket sales and the bottom line matter far more than disgruntled fanboys on the internet and in that arena, Black Panther is going to be hard to stop. The film has already officially outpaced every single other superhero movie ever in advanced ticket sales. This misguided Rotten Tomatoes campaign can’t change that, making it truly a waste of time.

Black Panther currently has a ComicBook.com User Anticipation Rating of 4.17 out of 5, making it the second most anticipated upcoming comic book movie among ComicBook.com Users. Let us know how excited you are for Black Panther by giving the movie your own ComicBook.com User Anticipation Rating below.

Black Panther opens in theaters on February 16th.

Other upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe movies include; Avengers: Infinity War on May 4th, Ant-Man and the Wasp on July 6th, Captain Marvel on March 8, 2019, the fourth Avengers movie on May 3, 2019, the sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming on July 5, 2019, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in 2020.