These days, a movie's Rotten Tomatoes score is just as important as any individual review.
The website, which aggregates reviews from critics and audiences and scores the movie based on what percentage of people liked and disliked the film, has, for better or worse, become an industry standard way to judge a movie's quality.
Except, of course, when "fans" decide to tank a movie's score to make a political statement.
Toxic fanbases, often young, White male movie-goers, have recently made a habit out of downvoting movies they haven't even seen yet.
Why?
Because they want movies starring women or people of color to fail.
Upcoming movies like Star Wars: Episode IX and Captain Marvel, which haven't been seen by any members of the general public yet, have become the latest targets of these trolls.
They who spam the movie's account with negative reviews for a movie they have never seen.
Many of the negative reviews, intended to leave the movie with a bad Rotten Tomatoes score so less people will see it, are generated by bots.
People online have long been calling for Rotten Tomatoes to change its system so that audiences can't vote on the quality of movies they haven't seen yet.
Finally, on February 25, they did just that.
Rotten Tomatoes will now be making some major changes to keep out trolls.
Of course, there's always more work to be done, but this is a great step!
The "fans" who downvote movies long before they premier are often young men who don't believe franchises they love should have entries starring women or people of color.
Fans were overjoyed at the change!
There were, however, some people online who thought the trolls blindly tanking a movie's reviews had a right to do so.
Most people seemed to agree that those people were wrong and were probably the ones tanking movies starring people who don't look like them.
Because having an all White male cast is OK, but adding women or people of color means "political correctness" and "agendas."
Many Twitter users had a problem with Rotten Tomato's grading metric even under the best of circumstances.
With this change to their system, Rotten Tomatoes is setting a wild precedent: only people who have seen a movie should be allowed to review it!
Crazy stuff, huh?
Well done, Rotten Tomatoes.
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