Captain Marvel is coming to cinemas in a few days from now on a wave of strong buzz, but as is often the case in the heated world of comic book fandoms, Carol Danvers’ solo debut has seen its share of online drama.
As you may have heard already, the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes page was the platform for a fair amount of backlash, as trolls flooded the site with negative takes in an effort to bomb the film’s Want To See rating. Shortly after this development, Rotten Tomatoes scrapped the “Want To See” feature from their site, though that hasn’t stopped anonymous users (and James Woods) from voicing their objections elsewhere. This online backlash came up in a recent interview with the cast and crew conducted by Italian media outlet BadTaste. Among those present was Lashana Lynch, who as it turns out, hasn’t paid much attention to the controversy.
“I really don’t understand it at all and because of that, and everything else, I don’t pay attention to it. I don’t read it, I don’t watch anything, I don’t pay attention to it — especially when I’m releasing a movie I’m very, very proud of.”
Lynch went on to observe how every movie requires time and effort from a lot of people, but trolling the result of their work is all too easy:
“Everyone worked very hard on this movie. Everyone works very hard on every movie. You see the credits at the end? There’s hundreds and hundreds, sometimes thousands, involved in this and it’s just important to give everyone their props. It’s very easy to hide behind a screen and say what you think.”
Samuel L. Jackson, meanwhile, argued that social media is giving a platform for people to voice ignorant opinions without any consequences:
“The mere fact that you give a voice or a platform to people who normally don’t have a platform is part of the problem. You can have an opinion that you don’t really have to be responsible for because nobody’s going to see you, nobody’s going to challenge you on it and if you want to bring somebody down or ruin somebody’s day, you can say anything. Everybody doesn’t want to be uplifting and that’s pretty much what that problem is.”
As for co-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the latter claimed that they too haven’t been paying attention to the online negativity:
“We basically don’t know much about it. We’ve been in a dark edit room for so long and we’ve just come out into the world and we’re looking around as if we’ve been trapped in ice for decades. I’m perplexed but I don’t really know enough to comment on it.”
Though Captain Marvel has turned out to be a touchy topic on various corners of the internet, things are actually looking pretty good for the film’s release later this week. While the social media response from early viewers bodes well for the movie’s critical reception, Boden and Fleck’s feature has already been the subject of some impressive opening weekend projections and strong pre-sales. We’ll see if Captain Marvel can live up to the hype when the film arrives in theaters on March 8th.
