Suicide Squad opens this Friday, and the embargo on reviews lifted yesterday. And the reviews are… not the greatest. The film stands at 35 percent with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, while fan interest is still at 98 percent, the film is tracking to possibly open to $140 million, and it just broke August records for Fandango ticket pre-sales. Fans and critics disagreeing on a superhero movie is nothing new, but every time it happens, it seems like some butthurt ninnies start screaming “conspiracy.”
This time around, a jokester created a thoroughly tongue-in-cheek petition on Change.org to shut down Rotten Tomatoes because they’re totally to blame when an unconnected mishmash of writers around the world generally don’t rave about something.
Warner Brothers — the studio behind Suicide Squad — owned Rotten Tomatoes until selling it to Fandango in February for a minority stake in the ticket selling company, which makes it even funnier that a glance at the comments accompanying the over 8,000 signatures would suggest there are a lot of people who are taking the petition completely seriously. (Why so serious?)
Actually, it’s about ethics in movie reviewing.
No, there isn’t a vast conspiracy by writers to promote one studio’s films over another, but it is fun to joke about it. The only thing about this situation that seems conspiratorial is that thousands of people who almost certainly haven’t seen the film yet are already enraged about bad reviews written by people who actually saw it. Sort of like how thousands of people who hadn’t seen Ghostbusters were rating it a one out of ten on IMDb. Now if you’ll pardon me, I have to go play on the hollow moon with my secret hoverboard they don’t want you to know about, as soon as I cash my fat check from Marvel for writing this post.
(Via Dorkly, Entertainment Weekly, The Wrap, and FiveThirtyEight)
