With the world premiere going down on Monday night, once the embargo was lifted on Tuesday, the film was met with absolutely bad reviews.
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In fairness, the Audience Score wasn’t too bad for “Batman v Superman”. “A petition definitely won’t shut down the site”, the creator said. Instead, a small but outspoken group is going after Rotten Tomatoes, a site that aggregates movie reviews.
As of writing, nearly 7,000 angered people have signed the petition, with the creator having since added a clarification note saying, in short, that it’s not about closing Rotten Tomatoes, it’s about sending a message. Rotten Tomatoes’ algorithm isn’t flawless but even if it was, it’s worth remembering that these are personal opinions expressed by individuals, not some widespread sanctioned condemnation spearheaded by Rotten Tomatoes and Marvel Studios on the low. What they don’t realize is that the website is a review aggregator. “The aim of the petition is to deliver a message to the critics that there is a lot of people disagree with their reviews”.
Among the myriad problems with this is that Rotten Tomatoes does not generate any content, merely aggregate it; its “rotten” and “fresh” ratings are derived from established critics who submit reviews written for other outlets to Rotten Tomatoes to be counted among their aggregated ratings.
Third, as noted by Entertainment Weekly, Warner Bros. – the company behind the DC cinematic universe – owned Rotten Tomatoes up until February when they sold it to ticket seller Fandango, with the studio still owning a minority stake in the website.
“Suicide Squad” will hit theaters on Friday (August 5th 2016), so only then will we get to see if the critics’ consensus has affect filmgoers’ opinions. I, for one, would say that, as far as Marvel properties go, only the first and third Iron Man movies and Sam Raimi’s first two Spider-Man films are in the same class as those DC titles, and even that’s a bit of a stretch.
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What is clear, is that you have to be a fearless film critic these days to come between a DC fan and their films.
