'Dark Knight Rises' Fuels Online Fury Between Critics, Fans
LOS ANGELES (CBS) - Movie review round-up site RottenTomatoes.com took the unprecedented step of turning off user feedback to critics' summaries this week after comments began to become threatening to those critics cool to "The Dark Knight Rises," Christopher Nolan's final film in his Batman trilogy.
"The job of policing the comments became more than my staff could handle for that film, so we stopped the comments altogether," said the site's editor-in-chief Matt Atchity to the Associated Press. "It just got to be too much hate based on reactions to reviews of movies that people hadn't even seen."
Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer was trending at 87 percent "fresh" for "Dark Knight Rises" from 68 reviews as of Wednesday.
Nolan's latest "Dark Knight" film from Warner Bros. Pictures, DC Entertainment and Legendary Pictures, is expected to dominate the summer box office when it opens this weekend. An estimate reported by the Los Angeles Times projected an opening weekend haul of upwards to $180 million. By comparison, "Ice Age: Continental Drift" opened with $46 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
This year's big theater tallies have been dominated by superhero films, from Columbia Pictures' "The Amazing Spider-Man," to Sony's "MIB 3," to Paramount Pictures' $600 million giant, "The Avengers."
Rotten Tomatoes showed 93 percent of its visitors wanted to see "Rises," building on a media buzz that's been growing from Super Bowl spots, to Comic-Con sneak peaks, to countless fan videos posted to YouTube. The backlash against critics may partially have been triggered by some review revealing too much about the movie to expectant fans.
"PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE reddit, do not post any Dark Knight spoilers," posted one Bat-crazed user on the viral media community site Reddit.com. "This is pretty much the only thing I have in my life."
