'Suicide Squad' Fans Petition to Shut Down Rotten Tomatoes 

DC Comics fans have launched a petition to shut down aggregate review site Rotten Tomatoes after the fanboy-favorite Suicide Squad got rated as a full-on stinker by the vast majority of professional critics. To be fair, we’re pretty sure this has to be a joke – but you never know.

After critics’ negative reviews of Suicide Squad went online Monday afternoon, DC’s latest ensemble super-villain movie came up with a fully-“rotten” 33 percent. Suicide Squad is the second movie from the Warner Bros.-owned superhero brand to be poorly received, after Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice last March drummed up a limp 27 percent score. Some DC fans, apparently blind to the relative crappiness of recent films, aren’t having it — as of this writing, the Change.org petition has over 11,000 signatures.

The whole thing is also ridiculous because in addition to DC, Warner Bros. owns Fandango Media, which owns Rotten Tomatoes. In other words, Warner Bros. owns a stake in Rotten Tomatoes, so petitioning fans are literally biting the hand that feeds them (though to be fair, it’s currently feeding them shitty movies).

Shortly after Suicide Squad’s reviews went live, a Change.org user named “Abdullah Coldwater” from Alexandria, Egypt, started a plainly-titled petition to “Shutdown Rotten Tomatoes.” Coldwater’s whose avatar is Lyanna Mormont from Game of Thrones, so it’s disappointing that his revolutionary fire wasn’t directed in a bit more logical direction. Here’s his impassioned argument against Rotten Tomatoes, a website that doesn’t actually rate movies but collects professional reviews and averages them out into a score out of 100. I’m copying and pasting it exactly as is, for the record.

We need this site to be shut down because It’s Critics always give The DC Extended Universe movies unjust Bad Reviews, Like

1- Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice 2016

2- Suicide Squad 2016

and that Affects people’s opinion even if it’s a really great movies

I understand if Abdullah’s first language isn’t English, but the brevity and the long list of two movies typify the absurdity of fandoms in 2016. Yes, because a large number of people don’t like something you like, that means it’s a conspiracy! Or bias! Or, maybe, it’s just that people don’t like it.

Whether or not Abdullah is joking — his “Clarification” indicates he’s not — plenty have written in the petition with dead seriousness. Others have signed in just to troll, but the ones who are being real are the ones to look out for.

“Why is this important?” one user asks as a legit rhetorical. “Unfair reviews can end up ruining people’s expectations to the point where they choose not to watch the movie at all (look what happened to bvs. I still find people who haven’t watched the movie, even though they happen to be avid watchers of other superhero movies). And that’s wrong on a multitude of levels … This will eventually lead to an imbalance in the industry. And that’s a terrible thing to happen.” Yeah. Fight the good fight, man.

“Rotten tomatoes is full of fake critics who tend to be biased towards certain films,” says another commenter who doesn’t understand how criticism works.

“Rotten tomatoes are a pretty sad website that is loads of biased reviews. For instance look at Pan, with Robin Williams. It was a great movie and reviewed horribly. And SharkNado getting good reviews that’s flat out sad. To hell with Rotten tomatoes,” reads another comment, copied and pasted exactly as it appears. (Also, Pan sucked too.)

“The critics of Rotten Tomatoes are just being unfair to DC. I’m both DC and Marvel fan. i understand BvS is not fun for everyone but its not as bad to get 27%. and civil war is not as good to get 90%. that is seriously unfair dude” reads another. Seems this person didn’t like the Russo Brothers’s bomb ass airport fight.

There’s a great book waiting to be written about modern fandoms and their so-personal response to critics who critique their favorite things. Between GamerGate and today’s superhero movies, there is a humongous misunderstanding as to how criticism works. I can’t wait to read that book, and I hope it comes sooner than the next DC movie.

Warner Bros. will release Suicide Squad August 5, which means most of these fans haven’t even seen it yet.