Captain Marvel is quickly approaching its release date and finds itself riding a wave of strong buzz, but with this being the internet and all that, and CM being a female-led movie, it was only expected that there’d be a number of vocal detractors, many of whom have already taken to flooding the pic’s Rotten Tomatoes page in an attempt to bomb its audience score.
This tactic is nothing new, of course, with Black Panther finding itself in a similar position last year. As anyone who recalls the box office figures of Ryan Coogler’s flick can tell you though, it certainly didn’t do much to harm the movie, and with Captain Marvel currently tracking for a big $100 million-plus domestic opening, it’s probably safe to say that the studio has nothing to worry about here.
Regardless, it seems the trolls are doing their job, as the pic now holds the lowest rating of any MCU release on Rotten Tomatoes as far as Audience Ratings go, with it currently sitting at 52%. It’s important to remember that this is different than the critics score, which hasn’t been released yet, but it still may dissuade some folks from checking it out.
Of course, a lot of what’s fueling these trolls is comments made by Brie Larson in June last year, when she called for more diversity in film criticism. While making a speech at the Crystal + Lucy Awards, the actress used the negative critical reception to A Wrinkle in Time as an example, explaining, “I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle in Time. It wasn’t made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color.”
As we said above, though, these trolls represent only a small portion of the internet and it’s unlikely they’ll have much impact on the film’s performance. But we’ll find out for sure when Captain Marvel flies into theaters on March 8th.