Rotten Tomatoes, the popular film and television review aggregator, announced it will be changing the way that it handles user-generated reviews and rankings in an effort to combat toxicity on the site.
In the near future, Rotten Tomatoes users will not be able to rate or leave comments about movies that haven’t come out yet, the site said in a blog post. Rotten Tomatoes has also removed its “Want to See” score for pre-release films, claiming that many users confused the metric with a film’s “Audience Score” (i.e. the percentage of Rotten Tomatoes users who gave the movie in question a positive ranking). The Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score only appears once a movie is available to the general public.
The changes follow a targeted harassment campaign focused on Marvel and Disney’s Captain Marvel, which arrives in theaters on March 8. In the weeks leading up to Captain Marvel‘s debut, users flooded Captain Marvel‘s Rotten Tomatoes page with angry and sexist comments despite not having seen the movie, most likely in an attempt to influence Captain Marvel‘s box office performance
This practice, known as “review bombing,” didn’t begin with Captain Marvel, which will be the first Marvel Studios film with a female lead. Paul Feig’s all-woman Ghostbusters reboot, Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi, which stars Daisy Ridley as a powerful Jedi-in-training, and Black Panther, which had a mostly black cast, are all previous review-bombing victims.
Rotten Tomatoes didn’t cite Captain Marvel as the reason behind its user review changes, saying only that “We have seen an uptick in non-constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling, which we believe is a disservice to our general readership.” Still, given the timing, it seems likely that the inflammatory Captain Marvel pre-release comments played a big part in the company’s decision.
Despite the trolls’ best efforts, Captain Marvel will probably be just fine. The film, which stars Academy Award-winner Brie Larson (Room, Kong: Skull Island) as the titular superhero, is on track for to make more than $100 million on its opening weekend, and already has more advance ticket sales than all but two of Marvel’s previous movies.
If audiences react to the character as positively as those reports indicate they will, they won’t have to wait long for a second helping of Carol Danvers — the good Captain is also set to play a large role in April’s big Marvel crossover flick, Avengers: Endgame.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?