Well, this just went from dumb to dumber. As you might recall, earlier this week reviews started arriving for Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises" and, believe it or not, some people just don't dig Gotham. A couple of negative reviews hit, and like some kind of bat signal for the fanboy moths, they descended en masse to Rotten Tomatoes unleashing their vitriol on those who dared to voice an opinion that didn't declare 'Rises' to be the greatest movie of all time. Now standing at a rating of 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, the site has had it with Bat-dorks.
On Monday, the site issued a statement requesting that readers "don't be a dick" in their comments section, and to act with some kind civility, but it seems the punishment will have to be more severe. Though initially promising to monitor all comments closely following the hate-fueled fire that blazed out early on, it seems it has been too much. "The job of policing the comments became more than my staff could handle for that film, so we stopped the comments altogether," editor-in-chief Matt Atchity told the Associated Press (via THR). "It just got to be too much hate based on reactions to reviews of movies that people hadn't even seen."
Oof. It's one thing to be a Batman fan, but these franchise obsessives are kind of truly embarrassing and this is the part where we'd make a call for some kind of sanity or reason, but clearly, the mental game of these folks is on a level that is impenetrable. But it looks the days of fanboys of any stripe shaking-and-crying on Rotten Tomatoes will soon be over. The site has already said they're looking at a Facebook-style commenting system that would eliminate anonymity — or they just might dump them altogether.
"There are a lot of options on the table," Atchity said. "We may do away with comments completely or get to a place where comments are only activated after a movie opens." So we'll see how this plays out. But don't worry — the IMDB boards are still available if you want movie discourse served to you from the lowest common denominator.