Sexist Trolls Are Already Waging War Against Captain Marvel With Negative Reviews
With weeks until its official release—and before early screenings for critics—sexist trolls are already flooding Captain Marvel's Rotten Tomatoes page with negative reviews.
"Larson has made it clear...men need not attend this movie," writes one.
"Larson's sexist and racist attitudes don't want me to spend money on this anyway, so here you go, Ms. Larson," says another.
Scrolling through the six pages of reviews shows this to be a similar theme—misogynist men angry to see a female superhero with her own movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Of course, this is nothing new for high-profile movies that boast a lead actor who is not a white male.
Trolls attacked Black Panther before and after its release. The same thing happened to Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi—two movies that had better representation in its main cast. In fact, one fan review of Captain Marvelwrites, "Oh boy first off this will be worst than the last jedi im calling it now critcs will love it audience hate it."
As massive franchises attempt to diversify their lead characters, racist and sexist trolls will push back through any means possible. It's a problem that's not limited to Rotten Tomatoes. Since its nomination for Best Picture, Black Panther has been targeted by organized racist attacks across social media, and in the audience reviews section of IMDB. Meanwhile, last year, Star Wars star Kelly Marie Tran was pushed off social media following racist and sexist attacks on Twitter and Instagram. The Last Jedi director, Rian Johnson, has spent the last year getting swarmed by angry trolls online.
This is a disturbing trend, but one that still hasn't had any real impact on the films themselves. Despite the vocal hatred from racist trolls, Black Panther remained the highest grossing film of 2018 and The Last Jedi the top spot for 2017. Black Pantheris also nominated for Best Picture at the upcoming Academy Awards.
And so the question this latest incident involving Captain Marvel prompts is when will sites like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes monitor their review sections for quality, filtering out racist, sexist attacks from legitimate reviews?
This story originally appeared on Esquire.com.
* Minor edits have been made by the Esquiremag.ph editors.
