Rotten Tomatoes Bans User Reviews and Comments Before a Film's Theatrical Release To Counter Online Trolls (rottentomatoes.com)

Rotten Tomatoes is finally addressing its troll problem. The review aggregation website has unveiled a new initiative to "modernize its audience rating system through a series of product enhancements," -- the first of which includes banning user reviews and comments prior to a movie's theatrical release. Getting rid of pre-release user reviews means internet trolls will not be able to flood film pages with negative scores before a movie comes out. As we saw earlier this week, Captain Marvel was at the receiving end of what appeared to be a targeted campaign to lower the upcoming movie's audience rating. Rotten Tomatoes is not banning user reviews entirely. It says it will offer this functionality to users once the movie has hit the theaters.

Further reading on Rotten Tomatoes: Movie Studios Are Blaming Rotten Tomatoes For Killing Movies No One Wants To See
Hollywood Producer Blames Rotten Tomatoes For Convincing People Not To See His Movie
Rotten Tomatoes Scores Don't Correlate To Box Office Success or Woes, Research Shows
DC Fans Angry Over Rotten Tomatoes 'Justice League' Ratings
Why Don't We Care About The Rotten Tomatoes Scores Of TV Shows?
Real Moviegoers Don't Care About Rotten Tomatoes.

Comments

Re:Common

[AmiMoJo]

I guess once the movie is out and raking in a billion dollars it's harder to pretend that it's failing and troll attacks are less effective.

Really though this is a more general problem with user ratings. Critics at least try to look at the movie for what it is, e.g. if they personally prefer rom-coms they don't automatically say a sci-fi epic is crap and will try to evaluate it by some kind objective or fair measure.

Users mostly just give their worthless reaction (because you have no idea if their OH dragged them to see it or if they were just annoyed at something stupid) or are trying to make some kind of political statement.

Critic ratings and box office take are about as good as it gets as indicators, even though you can always find high profile examples of both failing (e.g. Transformers). Use a bit of common sense to know if it's your kind of movie and forget about the culture wars.

Re:Common

[squiggleslash]

I guess once the movie is out and raking in a billion dollars it's harder to pretend that it's failing and troll attacks are less effective.

They're still trying to convince everyone The Last Jedi was a failure despite not merely raking in over a billion dollars, but also getting superb Cinemascore ratings (this is an opinion poll based upon people randomly selected leaving cinemas having watched it), and it being the best selling Blu-ray disc in 2018. So don't be surprised if the "Captain Marvel was a disaster, this is the end of the MCU, Disney is going to make superhero films with only white male leads form here on" narrative doesn't continue long after Captain Marvel 3: The Three Hours of Lectures About Toxic Masculinity has made its third billion dollars.

Re:100% false and a coverup

[Anonymous Coward]

Except of course by making up shit Brie Larson didn't say, you have self identified as a troll, so allow me to join the OMG TROLLZ group. Seriously, you couldn't spare the five seconds it would have taken to find/copy/paste the actual quote, which was: "I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle in Time. It wasn’t made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color, to teens that are biracial."

Seriously, if a comment like that gets you all butt-hurt, you might want to see about getting a butt helmet.