You may have heard reports lately of Captain Marvel’s Rotten Tomatoes page being flooded with negative comments in a coordinated effort to reduce the film’s audience approval score. Given that the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy is an even touchier subject online than the upcoming Marvel movie, it was to be expected that Star Wars: Episode IX would get the same treatment, but what was less predictable is that the Rotten Tomatoes backlash would start almost ten months prior to the pic’s release.
Within a suspiciously short period of time, the number of negative comments on the page for J.J. Abrams’ trilogy-closer has multiplied several-fold, while Star Wars blogger Bryan Young has observed that the film’s “Want to See” score dropped by 5% in a single day. Seeing how this score is based on over 5,000 ratings, we can conclude that either a whole load of people suddenly got the urge to take to the same website on the same day to say that they don’t want to watch the same movie, or this was another coordinated attempt to bomb the score.
Despite this online backlash, a lot of fans are currently anxious to see what Abrams has in store for the Sequel Trilogy finale. With principal photography wrapping earlier this month, the internet has been getting its hopes up that a teaser or a long-awaited title reveal might be imminent. Nonetheless, Lucasfilm continues to hold back its biggest promotional reveals, and at this rate, it wouldn’t be a surprise to learn that the title was being saved for Star Wars Celebration in April, or at least shortly beforehand.
In any case, you can expect the online drama to continue right up until Star Wars: Episode IX hits theaters on December 20th, 2019.