There are some people out there trying to take down Marvel’s Black Panther, but they don’t phase director Ryan Coogler one bit.
Videos by ComicBook.com
A group on Facebook called Down with Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and Its Fanboys, whose moderator describes himself as “alt-right,” announced plans to purposefully tank Black Panther‘s score on Rotten Tomatoes. The same group claimed to do the same thing for Star Wars: The Last Jedi in December, which currently has a 48 percent audience score.
This week, Huffington Post asked Black Panther director Ryan Coogler about the trolls’ plans to “tank” the movie.
As always, Coogler was cool as a cucumber.
“For me, I’m looking forward to everybody seeing the film,” the director said. “I’m really looking forward to sharing the film with audiences regardless of what their political views are…that’s kind of where I [stand on that].”
Rotten Tomatoes has become a controversial metric over the last couple of years, with many fans and critics believing that the score on the site doesn’t exactly tell the whole story, and that moviegoers should be actually reading reviews or just going to the movie and forming their own opinion. As a filmmaker, Coogler shares that sentiment.
“It can be an oversimplification of what critics are saying about a movie,” Coogler said of the Rotten Tomatoes score. “It’s quicker to look at the consensus than it is to read the articles. But I’m a person who definitely respects film criticism and draws on it in the filmmaking process.”
In addition to speaking with Coogler, Huffington Post reached out the the alt-right moderator of the Down With Disney page. In regards to The Last Jedi, his complaints began with the film’s “feminist agenda.” He went on to claim that Poe Dameron was a “victim of the anti-mansplaining movement” and that Poe and Luke Skywalker were in danger of being “turned gay.”
The Down With Disney page also sites its love of DC movies, and the supposed conspiracy that Disney is paying critics to hate the DCEU, as a part of its mission to take down Disney films. This has let to the creation of events to tank the scores of Marvel movies like Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War later this year.
As of Friday morning, the Down With Disney page is no longer available on Facebook.
Despite efforts from this group of trolls, Black Panther has received rave reactions from critics and press members who have seen the film. The movie will be released nationwide on February 16.
