The only thing more genuinely rotten than the deservedly awful critical average for Gotti are the assortment of trolls who descend upon any impending film with even the slightest hint of a progressive message in an effort to undermine its audience score before it's even released. Gotti, of course, deserves its fate. But with yet-to-be-released promising entries like next month's Captain Marvel being met with a wave of misogynistic nonsense, Rotten Tomatoes is stepping in with some updates to the site to curb what's become a very real problem.
Monday, the site announced the rollout of a few changes the team hopes will provide users with a more accurate representation of a movie's critical buzz. "Starting this week, Rotten Tomatoes will launch the first of several phases of updates that will refresh and modernize our Audience Rating System," a rep said. "We're doing it to more accurately and authentically represent the voice of fans, while protecting our data and public forums from bad actors."
The Want to See average will no longer be shown during a film's pre-release period, with Rotten Tomatoes citing a user habit of confusing the option with the Audience Score. Now, the top of a movie's RT page will look something like this:
The comments feature has now been disabled until a film's release due to "an uptick in non-constructive input" that they say borders on outright trolling. In addition to these troll-targeting updates, RT has also tweaked the site's entire presentation.
Another recent target of the exact behavior RT is clearly trying to battle is J.J. Abrams' recently wrapped Star Wars: Episode IX. Though the trilogy-completing franchise entry isn't officially out until Dec. 20, some review-bombing has already occurred.
