The Dark Knight Rises Reviews Force Rotten Tomatoes To Shut Down Comments


The Dark Knight Rises opens in cinemas tonight, and already it’s causing problems. Before the movie is even out in general release, review website Rotten Tomatoes has had to disable comments due to the veritable shit-storm generated by the negative reviews.

Rotten Tomatoes compiles movie reviews from a variety of different critics and posts them on a central page. As soon as the first negative review was posted, angry commenters started hitting the site.

Rotten Tomatoes’ chief, Matt Atchity, posted an open letter to the community telling people to be nice, but nobody took any notice of that, which has forced the site to disable comments entirely “for a few days”.

Atchity closes his letter with some sage advice for all of us:

But if I could ask everyone for one thing, it’s this: don’t be a dick. Even if you think someone else is being a dick. Just take a deep breath, step away from the computer, and maybe go for a walk. Have a smoke if you need one. There are plenty of other things to get angry about, like war, famine, poverty and crime. But not movie reviews.

Well said. [Rotten Tomatoes]