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.
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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.
“Shockingly Low”
Fun fact: #CaptainMarvel already has 58,000 user reviews on @RottenTomatoes with a “shockingly low” score of 31% (average user rating – 2/5). For reference, HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 3 (which has been out for nearly a month just in North America) has just 51k user reviews. pic.twitter.com/JlL3Hj8bxi
โ Scott Mendelson (@ScottMendelson) March 8, 2019
This is a problem for absolutely no one except ROTTEN TOMATOES. If they want us to take their audience user scores remotely seriously, they need to do something about this.
โ Scott Mendelson (@ScottMendelson) March 8, 2019
Not Helpful
They got rid of 54,000 audience reviews for #CaptainMarvel , and they’re still in the thirties, great job rotten tomatoes. pic.twitter.com/yyyWWtixNU
โ Zink (@Zink_Krimson) March 8, 2019
Something Is Off
According to @RottenTomatoes‘ audience score, more people saw CAPTAIN MARVEL during Thursday night previews than saw AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR for the whole of its theatrical run and home video release.
โ Mark Dujsik (@markreviews) March 8, 2019
Or the system is completely broken. pic.twitter.com/p9DWCP7v0h
Math Can’t Be Right
@RottenTomatoes How are so many fake reviews able to be posted?? Credit to @TheChrisFerrell #CaptainMarvel has more reviews in less than a day that #AvengersInfinityWar in eleven months… pic.twitter.com/GtqYJyoWil
โ Faye #WidowWarriors (@spyderladies13) March 8, 2019
Waiting For An Update
Me waiting for @RottenTomatoes to run a script purging any review score submitted by a new account that hasnโt reviewed anything but Alita and #CaptainMarvel. pic.twitter.com/Hy9JpTtEzx
โ Renfamous ๏ธฝโญ๏ธ๏ธฝ (@renfamous) March 8, 2019
Disconcerting
I’m not on the #CaptainMarvel hate train nor the bandwagon. I am disappointed the reasonable consensus is ‘generic action film’ but I’m still gonna catch it.
โ Doctor Nerdly (@DoctorNerdly) March 8, 2019
That said, I find @RottenTomatoes purging 54K reviews disconcerting. I don’t believe that CM only had 4K genuine reviews. pic.twitter.com/CXn1mPTdws
Bots Strike Again
And yes that horrible Captain Marvel Rotten Tomatoes score is from bots pic.twitter.com/ELWBXam55J
โ Daniel San ๏ธฝโต๏ธฝ ? (@LastWordMeta) March 8, 2019