Captain Marvel's Rotten Tomatoes page is already riddled with angry audience rhetoric—for a movie that's not out till March 8—and people who are upset about Brie Larson advocating for a more diverse film criticism community.
Comments include the foolish "why Marvel decided to cast a very vocal racist and sexist aimed at white males, I'll never know," the ultra corny "as a white male i dont think Brie would want me watching this movie," and the emo "once Brie went on an anti-White male tirade I lost interest in this movie." You can guess which group of people have taken issue with Larson's stances.
In an interview in the March 2019 issue of British Marie Claire, Larson spoke out on the "overwhelmingly white male" representation among film critics. Instead of simply running with this observation, Brie reached out to Dr. Stacy Smith from USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. Their 2017 study revealed that 80 percent of film critics were men, while top critics who are women of color amounting to just 2.5 percent.
Last June, Larson voiced her concerns during a speech at the Women in Film Crystal + Lucy Awards, spotlighting how white males cannot always be the appropraite audience to review every single type film. "I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle in Time," she said. "It wasn’t made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color."
"Am I saying I hate white dudes? No, I am not," Larson clarified. "What I am saying is if you make a movie that is a love letter to women of color, there is an insanely low chance a woman of color will have a chance to see your movie, and review your movie."
Brie has been making inclusivity a top priority for the Captain Marvel rollout, but the message has been predictably misinterpreted by some who think she's just shutting out white males entirely.
Captain Marvel hits theaters on March 8; Larson will return for Avengers: Endgame just weeks later.
Rotten Tomatoes saw a similar occurence two years ago when an alt-right group called "Down with Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and Its Fanboys" coordinated to an internet attack that resulted in a plummeting score for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Their reason for taking such action: the film was too feminist.
J.J. Abrams chastised those individuals who felt "threatened by women" while speaking to IndieWire. "Star Wars is a big galaxy, and you can sort of find almost anything you want to in Star Wars," he said. "If you are someone who feels threatened by women and needs to lash out against them, you can probably find an enemy in Star Wars. You can probably look at the first movie that George [Lucas] did [‘Star Wars: A New Hope’] and say that Leia was too outspoken, or she was too tough. Anyone who wants to find a problem with anything can find the problem. The internet seems to be made for that."
