Takedown
Rotten Tomatoes wimpily cowers from Batman geeks: Site cannot handle irate DarkKnight Rises fans
Rotten Tomatoes — the popular movie review aggregation site — cannot handle the fury of Batman geeks.
The site suspended user comments for the first time ever on reviews for the highly-anticipated summer blockbuster-to-be The Dark Knight Rises.
Comments on the reviews were becoming increasingly aggressive, profane and threatening towards anyone who wrote negative remarks about final film in director Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, which will be released to the public Friday.
Comments on the reviews were becoming increasingly aggressive, profane and threatening towards anyone who wrote negative remarks about the film.
"It just got to be too much hate based on reactions to reviews of a movie that people hadn't even seen," Tomatoes editor-in-chief Matt Atchity told the Associated Press.
The founder of Rotten Tomatoes is contemplating ways to prevent people from making harsh comments towards reviewers, especially when the commenters have not yet seen the movies themselves.
Atchity wrote on Rotten Tomatoes, "We're probably going to move to a Facebook-based commenting system that doesn't allow for anonymity. You'll have to stand by your comments, just like a critic does. So you'll still be able to argue about a movie you haven't seen, but people will know it was you."
Critics Marshall Fine, Christy Lemire and Nick Pinkerton received the blunt of the complaints and threatening comments due to their rotten reviews. Fine's comparison of The Dark Knight Rises to the Transformers series was not well received by Batman fans.
Atchity expects the same type of reaction will be triggered by the release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. In preparation of The Hobbit, Atchity continues to look into different ways to manage the comments.
"We're looking at many other options other than Facebook, including not allowing comments before a movie opens, moderating all comments before they go live, and a few other things. Facebook isn't the only thing we're considering," he said.
For his part, Nolan is all for his online believers firing back at the critics.
