DC Fanboy Petitions To Shutdown Rotten Tomatoes After Suicide Squad Mauling
"We are the 65%"
Not so long ago, a disgruntled DC fan decided to take his "jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams" thinking to the next level by petitioning to try and "stop Marvel from buying great reviews and trashing DC movies". This came in the wake of Civil War's success, gloriously missing the bit where Fantastic Four was pretty much proclaimed the worst thing ever.
That conspiracy theorist now has an equally idiotic friend, who has set up a petition aimed at Rotten Tomatoes - a review aggregator site, PARTLY OWNED BY WARNER BROS - to get them to shut down amid "bias" towards DC movies.
This comes after the first reviews of Suicide Squad saw it tumble to 35% on the aggregator site, amidst inevitable accusations that Marvel (or somebody) is paying these nefarious critic types to publicly destroy DC's reputation.
Clearly, this man doesn't know what Rotten Tomatoes is, or who it's owned by, but his simple, eloquent letter to the company's owners (among them the very people he thinks he's defending) reading "Shutdown Rotten Tomatoes" has received just under 7000 backers. A lot of them have been comedy backers, but still, it's frightening how many people actually believe the rhetoric here.
Maybe it's just time to accept that some films are bad, no matter how much it triggers you.
At the heart of the matter is a massive disregard for opinion, and the final death rattle of old school criticism. The petitioner's clarification reads as follows:
"The aim of the petition is to deliver a message to the critics that there is a lot of people disagree with their reviews. A lot of people the supporters and the opponents of the petition act like we are already going right now to shut down the site not it's just a way to express our anger."
He hasn't seen the film, and yet he's able without irony to say a lot of people disagree with their reviews. Where does this sense of entitlement come from? Why do fans who haven't seen a movie so vehemently battle against those who have simply because they KNOW the film is great because of the label on it?
It's not like anyone ever lambasts critics for mauling Warner Bros films, or Sony films, or Lionsgate films broadly speaking. It's only ever fandom properties (and let's be honest, ones with mostly male audiences), with comic book movies at the top of the pile. Just stop it.
Reviewers are not being paid for good or bad reviews (there's a strict self-regulation honour code that sees them called out if they are), reviewers are not maliciously trying to kill DC films. They're just not living up to hype or expectations.
Deal with it.