Feminist-hyped flick “Captain Marvel,” starring Woke actress Brie Larson, completely bombed in audience feedback on movie review site Rotten Tomatoes.
“Trolls” engaging on Rotten Tomatoes, not a dissatisfied audience, are apparently responsible for the low scores, according to the site. The unusually high (and negative) number of reviews on opening day was used to evidence such a narrative.
And in an effort to save “Captain Marvel” from such low audience scores, Rotten Tomatoes disabled visitors from rating their excitement about the flick pre-premiere and purged tens of thousands of bad reviews post-premiere.
But the desired outcome has still not been reached. “Captain Marvel” is sitting at a disappointing 63% audience rating, though that is significantly up from the 35% rating it hovered around on opening day.
The site’s newest initiative to assist the female-led film concerns common visitors having to somehow verify that they’ve seen the movie before they are allowed to leave a review. The Hollywood Reporter reported Wednesday:
A rep for the website now tells The Hollywood Reporter that additional measures are being considered in terms of audience reviews. Namely, a user may be asked to verify that he or she has seen the film in question before being allowed to post a critique. (It is unclear what that prompt would look like in practice.)
Dana Benson, a top communications representative for Fandango (parent company of Rotten Tomatoes), told The Hollywood Reporter, ”We are disappointed that there was a group of people who were obviously very passionate and who had a negative opinion of the movie, whether they saw it or not.”
Benson noted that there is a wipe gap between the critics’ review score and the general audience, which the site hopes to alleviate. ”We are in the middle of evolving the audience score. We want to ensure its credibility,” she said.
On Wednesday, the critics’ review of “Captain Marvel” — which has remained a steady since the film’s opening — is 16 percentage points higher than the audience review; 79% and 63% respectively.
In February, Rotten Tomatoes disabled visitors from scoring their excitement about the film after “Captain Marvel’s” “Want to See” score dropped to a dismal 27%.
“As of February 25, we will no longer show the ‘Want to See’ percentage score for a movie during its pre-release period. Why you might ask? 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.),” said a post from Rotten Tomatoes, adding: “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.”
The film’s star, actress Brie Larson, branded “Captain Marvel” as a “big feminist movie” and vowed that the press junket for the movie would not be “overwhelmingly white male.”
The Hollywood Reporter noted that ratings for Black Panther and the all-female Ghostbusters reboot were similarly hit by “trolls” looking to sandbag the films.