Sorry, trolls, we have some bad news for you. If you want to try to use Rotten Tomatoes to screw over a film based on your homophobic, racist, sexist, or just overall bigoted views, then you’re going to have to buy a ticket first.
According to Rotten Tomatoes (via THR), the review aggregation website is beginning to roll out a new feature with hopes that it will cut down on the abuse of the site’s system in an attempt to take down movies. The new idea borrows the basic idea from how the website treats critics and splits the audience ratings system into two, “verified” ratings and “all” ratings. The basic idea is that people can go to Rotten Tomatoes, click on the audience score and decide if they’d rather see the score from people who are “verified” to have bought a ticket (and therefore, actually seen the film) or just look at all the audience ratings and try to weed through the nonsense.
“We think this was the next place to add more credibility to our scores,” said Fandango CMO Lori Pantel. “One of the added values of verified is that is could dissuade what we call ‘bad actors’ from commenting on a film that they may not have even seen.”
So, how will Rotten Tomatoes “verify” that you’ve actually seen a film? Well, thanks to parent company, Fandango, if you bought your movie ticket through the online ticket service, then you can automatically be verified and give the audience rating. And if you’re not verified, you can still leave a rating, but it won’t be part of the “verified” group, natch.
Obviously, this is just step one in RT’s attempt to curb “review bomb” campaigns that saw audience scores plummet, such as the recent attempt to derail “Captain Marvel.” In the future, Rotten Tomatoes says it would love to have a way to verify more people, instead of those that just use Fandango.
“Ultimately, our goal is to make this as ubiquitous as possible,” said VP of product Greg Ferris.
As mentioned, critics’ reviews are already broken into two categories, with “all critics” and “top critics.” So, this audience rating system just borrows from that idea, but with the added benefit of trying to limit the number of trolls.
And we’ve said this before, but “trolls” doesn’t refer to everyone that doesn’t like a film. You have every right to hate a film, whether it’s because of bad acting, terrible script, horrible direction, or whatever the case may be. Those are valid criticisms and can be part of the healthy debate/discourse among film fans. However, those who use personal attacks on filmmakers and/or actors, and those that decide to use bigoted ideology as a reason to dislike a film, you are the problem. You are the trolls that Rotten Tomatoes is trying to silence.
