It seems as if Rotten Tomatoes is contemplating the decision to finally make you prove you’ve seen a movie before you can leave a review on the site. So you might want to start saving those ticket stubs and getting ready to show everyone that you’ve actually gone to see Captain Marvel.
What could possibly have made Rotten Tomatoes want to do this? There’s no explanation other than one of Marvel’s biggest movies coming out and being trashed on Rotten Tomatoes by trolls. Could that be the reason? Only everyone on the internet would know! Recently, again because of Captain Marvel, Rotten Tomatoes changed their policy so that audience scores couldn’t be added until after a film’s release, which also seems like a commonsense position that should have long been in place.
In all seriousness, verification should also have been put forward ages ago. How are you going to review a movie you haven’t seen? What? Did you watch a trailer and just figure “I hate/love this movie because of a message I think it is trying to sell me”? If that’s the case, Bohemian Rhapsody is a good movie. (It’s not a good movie, I hated it, but I thought I would like it from the trailer so my point remains.)
The reality of the situation is that Rotten Tomatoes has a problem with its audience reactions because they let you review something without any kind of proof that, you know, you’ve actually seen it. It’s the same thing with LetterBoxd. If you don’t like an actor, you can just go on there and tank all their movies because you feel like it. While it’s unclear how exactly verification would work, Screencrush speculates that since RT is owned by Fandango, there might be a way to “unlock” a review via your Fandango ticket purchase. This brings up some problems if you didn’t buy the ticket yourself or didn’t buy it through Fandango, but if the plan comes to fruition hopefully there’d be several ways to verify.
I do think that this wake-up call—blaring loud in terms of Captain Marvel—is a good thing. Rotten Tomatoes must be aware of how the internet works and what angry trolls will do to movies they’re brigading against. But at the same time. … what took them so long? There are probably countless movies on Rotten Tomatoes with terrible audience scores that most of the people never actually saw, but rated the way they did for Reasons.
At least now this might give me an excuse to keep all my ticket stubs, which I would have done anyway, but now, you know, reasons.
(via Screencrush, image: Marvel Entertainment)
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