Film review aggregate RottenTomatoes.com banned user comments for the first time after several movie critics received death threats for giving “The Dark Knight Rises” negative reviews.
“The job of policing the comments became more than my staff could handle for that film, so we stopped the comments altogher,” the site’s Editor-in-Chief Mark Atchity told the Associated Press Tuesday. “It just got to be too much hate based on reactions to reviews of movies that people haven’t even seen.”
“The Dark Knight Rises,” which opens Friday, is currently rated at 86% “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes. Only a small handful of critics have deemed the finale to Nolan’s Gotham trilogy “rotten.”
Atchity said he is worried that Peter Jackons’s upcoming “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” might face a similar black lash.
Rotten Tomatoes is considering several options for policing the comments section like changing to a commenting system much like that of Facebook so people can only comment after the movie has opened, or getting rid of comments completely.
The comments feature will likely be restored at the end of the week.