Last week, a brutal online attempt to derail the success of Marvel’s newest blockbuster “Black Panther” was itself terminated. The Facebook event called “Down with Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys” created an event called “Give Black Panther a Rotten Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes.” The group claimed their motive behind these attacks was to lower the film’s viewer score on Rotten Tomatoes in attempt to even the score between Marvel and DC films, showing Disney that its involvement with Marvel was unwanted.
These fans claim that this level of sabotage was precipitated by corruption from Disney by Disney. They believe that the company paid off critics to lower the Rotten Tomato scores of the most recent DC movies, and they wanted retribution. Thousands attempted to give the blockbuster a one-star rating in order to interfere with its overall score. When these actions occurred on Facebook, the website was quick to put a halt to the intolerance. The event was deleted on the grounds that it “violated the company’s community standards.”
Rotten Tomatoes also issued a response, stating that, “While we respect our fans’ diverse opinions, we do not condone hate speech.”
This type of protest has become a popular way to project hatred onto other films in recent years. The 2016 “Ghostbusters” suffered similar attempts of sabotage when viewers banded together to protest the female cast. To this day, the film’s trailer is still the most disliked film trailer on YouTube after similar campaigns were launched for the sole purpose of tarnishing the movie’s reputation before it was even released. The newest additions to the Star Wars franchise have also come under fire on Rotten Tomatoes, earning substantially lower audience scores than critic scores. Fans united to demonstrate their outrage at the film’s progressive and feminist ideals, claiming that the franchise was trying too hard to show diversity.
The same Facebook group that responsible for the“The Last Jedi” audience score is responsible for the “Black Panther” campaign as The group stood by their statements, maintaining that their protest was about Disney’s involvement with Marvel, not “Black Panther” specifically. However, many have highlighted that this level of obstruction has not been directed at other recent Marvel films. This group was not vocally opposed to Disney’s control over the Marvel Universe until the release of “Black Panther,” seeing as Disney has maintained control since 2009 and this is the first petition of its kind. This newfound hate towards Marvel seems to stem towards the films cast- a predominantly black group of actors. The difference in fans opinions about Black Panther is clear when compared to Marvel’s last movie, “Thor: Ragnarok,” which was released in November, four months before the release of Black Panther.
Both films scored extremely well by critics on Rotten Tomatoes with “Thor: Ragnarok” receiving a 92 percent and “Black Panther” a 99 percent. However, on IMDb, the distribution of viewer votes is disturbing. When looking at the results for “Thor: Ragnarok,” the scores tend to be very high with a few lower votes periodically. This is a drastic contrast to Black Panther’s votes on the website. There are a plethora of 10 out of 10’s and very high ratings. However, about 30 percent of the votes were one star ratings. This not only dramatically lowered the films overall score, but it also raised red flags. The distribution of votes was clearly a deliberate attempt to sabotage the films ratings, a tactic not used on the prior Marvel movies.
Even with attempts to lower the films ratings, “Black Panther” is still projected to be one of the year’s biggest films.
Cassidy Sorenson • Mar 9, 2018 at 12:04 am
From what i’ve heard this movie is really good, the cast is diverse, and its paced well. Its a shame there are people trying to work against the creators and actors in this movie by giving the movie bad ratings.
Tomas Elias • Feb 22, 2018 at 2:24 pm
Well written and personally I loved the movie and would watch 10 more times.