Here’s Why Rotten Tomatoes Removed Thousands Of ‘Captain Marvel’ Reviews
Within hours of the release of Captain Marvel, thousands of reviews had been added to review site Rotten Tomatoes — before being deleted. According to reports, this was due, in part, to technical difficulties resulting from a system upgrade.
IGN has reported that within hours of Captain Marvel being released, the Rotten Tomatoes site had been inundated with tens of thousands of reviews. Approximately 58,000 reviews were recorded, which brought the audience score down to 33 percent. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, this number of reviews is “more than the total of audience score reviews for Avengers: Infinity War for its entire theatrical run,” indicating there may have been a deliberate influx of fake — or troll — reviews aimed at bringing down the overall rating of Captain Marvel on the site.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, Rotten Tomatoes had been involved in a complete system overhaul in an attempt to weed out trolls that were aiming to bring down the overall rating of Captain Marvel. It is believed that the current wave of deleted reviews is in direct relation to this upgrade.
With previous attempts at bringing movie ratings down by flooding the site with early low reviews, Rotten Tomatoes was attempting to counteract this by disabling the early review function.
“We are disabling the comment function prior to a movie’s release date,” Rotten Tomatoes said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“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.”
Disney's #CaptainMarvel sandbagged on Rotten Tomatoes within a few hours of opening https://t.co/vKe3XYdkzu pic.twitter.com/VYNTSTuHNw
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) March 8, 2019
Users are still allowed to add that they are interested in seeing the movie prior to its release. And, they are also invited to leave their reviews after the release date of movies.
Rotten Tomatoes has now released a statement to The Hollywood Reporter explaining why so many reviews turned up on their site and then disappeared.
According to the statement, a bug in the upgrade had led to the site erroneously including these early reviews, something that is no longer permitted. As a result of this, many early reviews were released to the site. These reviews were later taken down.
“We launched some changes to the movie pre-release functionality last week, which included not allowing users to leave a comment or review prior to a movie’s release in theatres,” Rotten Tomatoes also said in their statement.
