'Black Panther' sabotage campaign highlights how useless the Rotten Tomatoes audience score really is
Black Panther isn't opening for another couple of weeks, but one group of self-described "fanboys" is already preparing to be Mad Online.
A campaign is underway to "Give Black Panther a Rotten Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes," with about 5,500 thousand users (as of writing) interested in or planning to participate.
The "event," organized by a group calling itself "Down With Disney's Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys," trumpets the "massive success" of a similar campaign to tank Star Wars: The Last Jedi's Rotten Tomatoes audience score.
(Note: The Rotten Tomatoes audience score is a separate number from the Rotten Tomatoes critics score, which is pulled from reviews of established critics. One has no bearing on the other.)
According to the page, these campaigns are an effort to retaliate against Disney, whom they falsely accuse of paying off critics to trash the DCEU movies.
Never mind that these same supposedly anti-DC critics swooned over Wonder Woman. Or that Justice League earned that 40% all by itself, with its aimless plotting and sloppy characterization. In the fandom wars, the only possible explanation for someone disagreeing with you about a movie is malicious dishonesty.
And you know what? Black Panther's performance with Rotten Tomatoes readers should teach us all a lesson – but probably not the one these DCEU stans had in mind. What it actually shows us is how useless these audience scores are in the first place.
This planned sabotage highlights just how easy it is to manipulate these scores. All you need is to convince some people to go to a website and check a few boxes. Maybe not even that, if, as one surly Last Jedi hater claimed, you can build some bots to do that for you.
Get enough negative votes on there, and it starts to look like "general audiences" really hate a particular film when, in fact, it's just a small handful of disgruntled folks purposely trying to skew the results.
Moreover, even under the best of circumstances – even if you assume every single Rotten Tomatoes voter is expressing an earnest opinion about a film they've seen – these ratings aren't exactly what you'd call scientific. "People who care enough about a given movie to log into Rotten Tomatoes and rate it" is an inherently self-selecting sample, after all.
It's true that critics don't always see eye-to-eye with the larger moviegoing population, and there's certainly value in examining where they differ and why. Informal polls like the Rotten Tomatoes audience score or the IMDb user rating can help inspire those conversations. But sabotage attempts like this should remind us all to take those numbers with giant, heaping spoonfuls of salt.
Meanwhile, if you're really determined to find out how non-critics feel about a film, there are professional services wondering the same thing – like CinemaScore or SurveyMonkey, for instance. Sure, they might not be perfect. But at least they're not so easily gamed by a few cranks.
