Normally, you’d expect a huge blockbuster film to be at the very forefront of Rotten Tomatoes. The site is the popular aggregator of critic and audience ratings, although it has lost some interest after a number of controversies surrounding possibly protecting the film industry from bad reviews. But shockingly for a new Marvel film, The Eternals, you’d be hard-pressed to find the movie anywhere on the home page.
Rather than featuring a new Marvel film on the front page with a green splat signaling the film is “rotten”, the movie is hidden on a slider. Instead, “huge” films like Keyboard Fantasies and Unstuck in Time are front and center for the Rotten Tomatoes home page. This is significant because The Eternals is the first “rotten” Marvel film in the modern Marvel movies.
It’s unlikely to get better for Marvel, even if sites like Rotten Tomatoes try to provide aid. Over at Screen Rant, they’re busy claiming the film is part of a “review bombing” from a “subset of people”. The problem is that critics themselves — often a group that skews hard in a different direction than “subsets of people” within an audience — have the movie below a passing grade. And it’s not as if reaching a passing grade on Rotten Tomatoes is hard. Any grade of at least “average” is good enough, which then means that a movie of only average merit can be “Certified Fresh” with an 80%+ score… if only enough reviewers say the movie was “meh”.
Yet even with such a low bar to meet, The Eternals sits at only 57%.
That’s why articles like on Screen Rant will do no service for Marvel or The Walt Disney Company. Dragging The Eternals into the culture war, rather than just recognizing it is a flawed film, is a harmful exercise. It’s difficult to work through logic that says Black Panther can be received with great applause and near-universal praise, but The Eternals is the lowest rated film in the MCU because of “hate”.
“Review bombing is the practice of a subgroup of people providing a huge number of negative reviews to a movie before it has been released in an attempt to make producers think that public opinion is against them. The practice is not new and was used against the MCU’s Captain Marvel by people who were angry that they were producing a female-fronted superhero movie, feeling that the focus should remain on male characters. The Eternals review bomb is likely in response to the fact that it promises to be the MCU’s most diverse film to date, with a diverse cast of heroes that includes the first deaf superhero for the MCU (although Hawkeye is set to confirm Clint Barton as hard of hearing) and the MCU’s first openly gay superhero.” — Faefyx Collington, Screen Rant
While a less cynical person might think this is all about politics, a person like myself thinks this is more likely related to business. Access media needs to stay on Disney’s good side to receive… access. And while Disney is fine with the politics of China, the company is not fine with losing money. So perhaps claiming a poorly received film is due to bigots, rather than just being a less-than-stellar popcorn flick, is a way to ride to the rescue of a giant corporation in desire of money? After all, Screen Rant is surprisingly quiet when it comes to the Uighur Muslims in concentration camps near where Mulan was filmed.
Image Courtesy: Variety
Perhaps we should all be reminded that this strategy seems to be employed anytime a Marvel or Disney film is in danger of coming under expectations. This time, it requires one to believe that even the officially recognized reviewers of Rotten Tomatoes are an awful ilk. The same reviewers that gave glowing coverage to the Fauci documentary on Disney+, while audience members gave it the lowest rated audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
So maybe, just maybe, this isn’t about human rights at all. Maybe it’s just about money and power.
