Rotten Tomatoes, the Movie review Site, continues down the path of self destruction.

It took a major turn for the worse when it eliminated commentary on films prior to their release. At the same time it also disabled the feature that allowed people to indicate whether or not they intended to see a particular film under the heading: “Want to see.” All of this took place in advance of the Release of “Captain Marvel” which had received a tremendous backlash over the male bashing comments made by the film’s lead Brie Larson.

Following its release RT went a step further when it “accidentally” deleted more than 50,000 negative reviews in an obvious attempt to boost the flagging Audience score which up to that point was sitting at a low of 34% in stark contrast to the Critic’s score of 79%. They succeeded. The Audience score though still comparatively low has been bumped up to 62%.

Why would the Site go to such lengths to gin up the numbers of this particular film? The answer as always is follow the money trail.

Rotten Tomatoes is owned by Fandango a major purveyor of online ticket sales. The other reason is the Site is operated by former Disney executives, Disney now being the parent company of Marvel.

As if purging reviews portraying the film in a negative light wasn’t bad enough, “The Daily Wire” is now saying that in order to prevent “trolling” of films and the Site itself in the future, RT is considering implementing a practice which would require a person to prove they’d actually seen the film in order to leave a review.

The logistics of this are headache inducing. What poor sap is going to be assigned the unenviable task of matching pics of ticket stubs to a person’s review? Worse, how do we know given their already shady practices that Rotten Tomatoes won’t simply use this as an excuse to eliminate virtually all negative comments or at least enough to make the Audience score match the Critic’s?

There are countless incidents of this occuring and not just in one direction. There are many cases where the Audience score was more favorable towards a particular film than that of the critics. The most recent example being “Alita Battle Angel” which received a Critic’s score of 60% but an Audience score of 94.

Will Rotten Tomatoes now fudge those nunbers as well in order to hurt a film that may be in competition with one that for financial reasons they favor?

It’s impossible now not to question the validity of the numbers of the Site moving forward.

The only thing beyond question is that by engaging in such practices, Rotten Tomatoes has destroyed what little credibility they had left.

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