Captain Marvelstarted the day off with 58,000+ reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. To put that into perspective,Infinity War, which was released nearly a year ago, has a grand total of 53,000 reviews. Even before the Carol Danvers standalone movie hit theaters, negative comments were popping up in the ‘Want to See’ section of the site, referred to as ‘review bombing’, which led to Rotten Tomatoes removing the early ratings feature. In doing so, they purged all that early trash talk. However, even after purging many of the negative user reviews that showed up this morning, the dismal 34% ‘Liked It’ audience score remains, and can still be seen, which Rotten Tomatoes now blames on a glitch.
Trolls decided to bring downtheCaptain MarvelRotten Tomatoes score, and it’s believed they used bots to do so. After seeing tens of thousands of reviews pop up in a matter of hours, the site decided to delete thousands of them, which was in addition to the early review comments that had already been scrubbed. This comes after the site made changes last week to stop trolls from review bombing. Rotten Tomatoes released a statement about this new glitch discovered this morning, just hours afterCaptain Marvelwas released in theaters for preview night, which you can read below.
“We have identified a bug in the post-release functionality for the movies that have released into theaterssince our product update last week. 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.”
Even after recognizing the glitch, theCaptain Marveluser score is still the same. The Marvel Cinematic Universe movie is set to be abox officesuccess this weekend and may have just rendered the whole Rotten Tomatoes user score platform useless. Trolls have been targeting all of the Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm movies put out under the Disney umbrella, but this is some next level trolling with the addition of bots into the equation.
Though Rotten Tomatoes didn’t nameCaptain Marvelfor the reasoning behind their changes last week, it’s pretty obvious that it was the true reason. Additionally, trollswere already targeting Star Wars 9and we haven’t even seen one second of footage. The movie doesn’t even hit theaters until the end of the year. Rotten Tomatoes had this to say.
“We are 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. Don’t worry though, fans will still get to have their say: Once a movie is released, audiences can leave a user rating and comments as they always have.”
TheCaptain Marveluser scores on Rotten Tomatoes are completely useless as of this writing. However, that is usually the case these days with just about anything. We’ll have to see if there is another targeted attack on the Carol Danvers standalone movie in the coming days, but again, it really doesn’t even matter. The trolls have succeeded at sandbaggingCaptain Marveland they will do so again forAvengers: EndgameandStar Wars 9. The Hollywood Reporter was the first to announce the Rotten Tomatoes glitch.
