Captain Marvel is out in UK cinemas on March 8, 2019. But in the wake of Brie Larson’s interview, in which she stated she wanted to see a more diverse pool of journalists at Captain Marvel screenings, the trolls have come out.And they took their complaints to one of the biggest movie rating sites: Rotten Tomatoes.
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Rotten Tomatoes announced their attempt to “more accurately and authentically represent the voice of fans” on their site.
Their other goal was to reduce the influence of “bad actors” according to a blog post the site published yesterday.
Though Rotten Tomatoes’ decision doesn’t directly reference Captain Marvel, the superhero movie likely played an important factor.
The reviews aggregator is removing the “Want To See” rating on movies’ pages before they’re in theatres.
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They claim people often incorrectly assume that percentage is the same thing as ratings from people who’ve actually seen the film.
Rotten Tomatoes wrote: “We are disabling the comment function prior to a movie’s release date.
“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.
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“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.”
The trolls were largely reacting to the perceived injustice in Larson deigning to point out the already obvious: film critics are disproportionately white and male.
Though plenty of women film critics exist, Larson noticed the trend towards a white-male dominated press pool.
In an interview with Marie Claire, Larson said: “About a year ago, I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white-male.”
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“So, I spoke to Dr Stacy Smith at the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, who put together a study to confirm that.
“Moving forward, I decided to make sure my press days were more inclusive.
“After speaking with you [Keah Brown, journalist; a woman of colour with cerebral palsy], the film critic Valerie Complex and a few other women of colour, it sounded like across the board they weren’t getting the same opportunities as others.
“When I talked to the facilities that weren’t providing it, they all had different excuses.”
The fragile masculinity of certain fans may be threatened, but Captain Marvel waits for no white man.
Captain Marvel is out in cinemas on March 8, 2019.