The Dark Knight Rises -- This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

The Dark Knight Rises -- This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Matt Atchity here, Editor in Chief of Rotten Tomatoes. I want to set the record straight on some of the things that are happening with the reviews for The Dark Knight Rises right now.

It's probably safe to say that The Dark Knight Rises is the most anticipated film of the year. More than The Hobbit. More than The Avengers. And my staff and I knew full well that when the first negative review came in, the reviewer would get pasted in the comments. That dubious honor goes to Marshall Fine. He's a critic we've included on our site -- he's got a respectable background in criticism, and we think he should be included on our site.

Since the referral traffic seems to have crashed his server, we've temporarily removed the review link at Fine's request, so his site can go back up. But the score will not be affected. His Rotten review still applies to the score, even if the link isn't active at the moment.

As expected, we saw a mountain of comments come in about his review, and we're policing them to make sure they're in line with our TOS. Broadly speaking, threats and hate speech will get your commenting privileges revoked.

But Marshall has the right to not like the movie, and people have the right to express their disagreement with him (although if you haven't seen the movie, your arguments may be on shaky ground). And we have the right to pull your comment down and ban you if we think you're acting inappropriately.

Which leads me to Eric D. Snider. He thought it would be funny to post a negative review link on Rotten Tomatoes that links to his own site. He misrepresented his review link. (In case you didn't know, some critics post their own reviews, and my staff posts some -- it's about 50/50). By attributing the link to Film.com, he misrepresented that organization. This is not the first time he's done this, nor is it the first time his journalistic ethics have been brought into question. In our opinion, by knowingly posting a link that isn't a review (and he hadn't seen the movie), Snider has abused our trust, and therefore, his reviews will no longer apply to the Tomatometer.

Update: A second negative review came in, and we'll be policing those comments, too.
Second Update: We have disabled comments on The Dark Knight Rises reviews for a few days.

source