Rotten Tomatoes has made changes to how users can interact with movies before they’ve been released, partially in response to an “uptick in non-constructive input“.
The review aggregator will be removing the ability for users to add comments before a film’s release date and will be ditching the ‘Want to See’ score, which theoretically gauges the public’s enthusiasm for a movie prior to it coming out in cinemas.
[jwplayer 0guRQoL8]
Movies deemed controversial by a particularly ~online~ type of person have been ‘review bombed’ on the site in the past — movies like The Last Jedi, which committed the heinous sin of having women in it. More recently, the upcoming Captain Marvel has faced the same treatment, for very similar reasons.
In their announcement, Rotten Tomatoes said that the decision to remove the ‘Want to See’ score was due to it being “often times confused with the ‘Audience Score’ percentage number“, while the removal of pre-release comments was more specifically due to abuse:
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. 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.
While these might seem like relatively minor updates, to the people in the comments, this is the worst thing that has ever happened in human history:
My personal favourite:
Speaking to CNET, Paul Yanover, the president of Rotten Tomatoes’ parent company Fandango, said that it wasn’t specifically done as a reaction to the review bombing of Captain Marvel, but that some of the changes were targeted at achieving “noise reduction” around some movies.
Hopefully you personally are able to cope with only reviewing a movie after you have seen it.
