A fresh development emerges in the ongoing drama over Captain Marvel’s Rotten Tomatoes page, with the site now offering an explanation for why the number of user ratings was implausibly high on the day of release, before experiencing a sudden drop.
To recap, in the weeks leading up to the release of Carol Danvers’ solo debut, the film’s Rotten Tomatoes page saw an influx of negative takes in an effort to bomb the movie’s “want to see” score. Last week, however, the site put a stop to this when they began allowing user comments only for films that have been released – a measure that they described as “noise reduction.”
As RT put it in a new statement to THR:
“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. However, we still invite users to vote if they ‘want to see’ a movie prior to its release, and that vote total is displayed on the site.”
Of course, once the movie came out in theaters, the trolls were again free to resume the campaign. But while it was predictable that Captain Marvel’s page would see ratings flood in at a far quicker rate than your average blockbuster, the 58,000-plus ratings it boasted long before the end of the film’s first day seemed awfully high, even for a movie that’s drawn this level of online backlash. To complicate matters further, part of the way through that same opening day, the number of ratings suddenly dropped by over 50,000.
As it turns out, that initial 58,000 figure was the result of a bug that counted all those ratings from before the movie was released, with the site explaining the situation to THR as follows:
“We have identified a bug in the post-release functionality for the movies that have released into theaters since our product update last week. The quantity of user ratings (which is displayed directly below the audience score and is intended to only include the quantity of users who have left a rating or written review after a movie’s release) had included both pre-release and post-release fan voting.”
Of course, purging all the pre-release ratings isn’t stopping anyone from voicing their criticisms now that the movie’s out, and you can see this from the film’s current “liked it” score of 34%, based on a more believable 10,000-plus ratings.
Either way, the whopping $20.7 million gross earned by Captain Marvel from Thursday previews alone indicates that the filmgoing public is paying little mind to such online backlash, though we’ll see if the feature can perform as well as projected as we move further into the weekend.
