Rotten Tomatoes Makes Changes After Captain Marvel Trolled With Negative Reviews

Rotten Tomatoes is making changes to its website after it became the latest front in a culture war over Captain Marvel. To recap, fans began bombarding the film’s page on the review aggregate over the weekend due to comments Brie Larson made about increasing the diversity of reporters on her press tour. As of yesterday the film had 47,806 user reviews before critic’s full reviews have even hit and over a week before the film releases, 73% which are negative.

In response, the site announced on Tuesday that they were making changes to the site, stating, “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 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.”

What this means is that the “Want to See” metric is no longer visible, and users won’t be able to comment on the film before its scheduled release date. Captain Marvel isn’t the only film to have been attacked on the site; Star Wars: The Last Jedi was hit with a wave of negative comments, though those were all done after the film’s release. Black Panther was hit with a host of negative comments, many couched as reviews, before that film’s release.

“Over the past few years, Rotten Tomatoes has been evolving into a robust movie and TV show recommendations platform that celebrates the views of professional critics and fans alike, and encourages discussion and debate,” said Rotten Tomatoes executive Ara Nalbandian. “We continue to invest in our product to deliver useful and relevant resources for fans and are in development on new tools to help fans express their opinions and connect with others.”

Fans will still be able to voice their opinions on Captain Marvel once it releases on March 8th.