The controversy surrounding Captain Marvel and Rotten Tomatoes continues as apparently the review aggregate site run by a former Disney employee has deleted upwards of 54,000 user reviews, which affects the Audience Score.
Users on social media have pointed out that earlier saw the Captain Marvel Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score have upward of 58K votes, but now a majority of those votes and reviews have been deleted by Rotten Tomatoes. A recent check of the site reveals there are now around 12k votes and reviews listed by fans.
@DDayCobra @RottenTomatoes seems to be deleting reviews. User count used to be at 58,353, but now it is at 58,327.
— —- — P3NNYW0RTH — — (@P3NNY_W0RTH) March 8, 2019
Rotten Tomatoes recently delisted users’ ability to vote whether or not they “Want to See” a movie, citing confusion with its “Audience Score,” but now apparently that doesn’t seem to really be the case, as the site seems to be attempting to censor and game the Audience Score by restarting the user process of reviews and voting. What is interesting is that the Captain Marvel Audience Score really hasn’t changed much as it stands at 38%, an MCU low, so Rotten Tomatoes’ attempts at – whatever they are doing – have been futile. I’m guessing the next step Rotten Tomatoes will take is to suspend user voting and reviews citing “trolls.”
Update: Rotten Tomatoes claims it was a bug and that user ratings for pre-release were factored into the post-release Audience Score for Captain Marvel. However, this contradicts their previous statement and reasoning that the “Want to See” score is different than the “Audience Score,” which only gets released after a movie is out.
While some fans may be quick to point to the present high box office for Captain Marvel as evidence the movie is liked, and that the Rotten Tomatoes reviews are fake, a high box office doesn’t necessary mean the movie will perform better at the box office in the long run or will be liked by the critics or fans, with obvious cases being movies such as Han Solo, Suicide Squad, Batman vs. Superman, and I would even throw in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which is responsible in part for Han Solo performing so poorly in addition to Disney having stopped making any new Star Wars movies following Episode IX (none are in production). Even if Captain Marvel has a huge opening weekend box office, it remains to be seen if the flick will have legs. Again movies like Batman vs Superman and Man of Steel started strong out of the gate but faded away in subsequent weeks. It will be interesting to see Captain Marvel‘s box office in the long run in addition to its foreign gross. Aquaman was okay here in the U.S. but was huge overseas, with the same applying to Venom. Will something similar happen for Captain Marvel?
(h/t YouTube)
