Rotten Tomatoes cracking down on troll reviews ahead of Captain Marvel release

Feb 26, 2019

By Ari Rees

Rotten Tomatoes is giving the green splat to moviegoers leaving bad reviews ahead of the “Captain Marvel” release.

What happened: This week Rotten Tomatoes disabled the “Want to See” metric from their website, preventing anticipation reviews ahead of the upcoming “Captain Marvel” movie.

The “Want to See” metric monitored the percentage of fans with an interest in seeing certain films. “Captain Marvel” reportedly had a 29 percent rating on the “Want to See” metric before Rotten Tomatoes disabled it, according to ComicBook.com.

In an official statement on the change, Rotten Tomatoes said, “As of Feb. 25, we will no longer show the ‘Want to See’ percentage score for a movie during its pre-release period. … We’ve found that the ‘Want to See’ percentage score is often times confused with the ‘Audience Score’ percentage number.
“The ‘Audience Score’ percentage, for those who haven’t been following, is the percentage of all users who have rated the movie or TV show positively — that is, given it a star rating of 3.5 or higher — and is only shown once the movie or TV show is released,” the company said.
Rotten Tomatoes added that they will also be disabling the comment function prior to a movie’s release date. “Unfortunately, we have seen an uptick in non-constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling, which we believe is a disservice to our general readership. We have decided that turning off this feature for now is the best course of action,” the release stated.

“Review bombs”

“Captain Marvel” is one of several recent films that have been bombed in reviews by disgruntled fans ahead of their release date.

Earlier this month, Screen Rant reported that “a slew of hateful comments” about the film and star Brie Larson had been left on Rotten Tomatoes, many referencing how the film pushes feminism to the forefront of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Zachary Levi, who stars in the upcoming “Shazam!” film, recently spoke out against inflammatory reviews against “Captain Marvel.”

Here’s @ZacharyLevi asking fans to stop piting #CaptainMarvel and #Shazam against each other, because IT ISN’T HELPING ANYONE. He’s also calling out the fake reviews and fabricated/defamatory posts about @brielarson. —It’s time for those people to really listen. pic.twitter.com/SzL0iowj5T

— alias (@itsjustanx) February 24, 2019

“I just found this out last night, and for anyone out there who thinks you’re doing me a favor, you’re doing Shazam! a favor, or you’re doing Warner Bros.— you’re not,” Levi said. “This is not helping anyone or anything.”

“Star Wars: Episode IX” had also seen its share of “review bombs” before the feature was disabled from Rotten Tomatoes, according to ComicBook.com.

“Episode IX” complaints centered on discontent with Disney’s treatment of the Star Wars universe as well as issues taken with the plot or characters of “The Last Jedi.”

Date: “Captain Marvel” is scheduled for release March 8.