‘Captain Marvel’s Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score Finally Rises Above 50% as Battle With Review Bombers Continues

Captain Marvel brought a breath of fresh air into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it looks like one of the film’s online ratings is beginning to reflect that.

At the time of this writing, the Rotten Tomatoes audience score for Captain Marvel has risen to 55%, the highest it’s been since the film began to be “review bombed” by online trolls. You can check out a screenshot of the rating below.

In comparison, the film’s critical response on Rotten Tomatoes currently sits at a “Certified Fresh” rating of 79%, and the film earned an “A” rating from audience members on CinemaScore.

The nature of Captain Marvel‘s audience score has caused a bit of controversy in recent weeks, with the review bombing beginning almost a full month before the film actually debuted in theaters. In the time since, Rotten Tomatoes has both changed how fans can review upcoming films, and purged over 50,000 user reviews from their website, both of which have helped the audience score reflect the actual response to the film.

“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.” Rotten Tomatoes said in a statement last week. “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.”

“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.”

With Captain Marvel currently earning well above its initial box office projections and inspiring a legion of fans, it’s safe to say that the review bombing might just be a drop in the bucket in the film’s overall impact.

“The mere fact that you give a voice or a platform to people who normally don’t have a platform is part of the problem,” Samuel L. Jackson, who reprises his role as Nick Fury in the film, said in a recent interview. “You can have an opinion that you don’t really have to be responsible for because nobody’s going to see you, nobody’s going to challenge you on it and if you want to bring somebody down or ruin somebody’s day, you can say anything. Everybody doesn’t want to be uplifting and that’s pretty much what that problem is.”

“I don’t pay attention to it.” Lashana Lynch, who plays Maria Lambeau, added. “I don’t read it, I don’t watch anything, I don’t pay attention to it — especially when I’m releasing a movie I’m very, very proud of. Everyone worked very hard on this movie. Everyone works very hard on every movie. You see the credits at the end? There’s hundreds and hundreds, sometimes thousands, involved in this and it’s just important to give everyone their props. It’s very easy to hide behind a screen and say what you think.”

Captain Marvel is in theaters now. It will be followed by Avengers: Endgame on April 26th, and Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5th.