While most folks are looking forward to Captain Marvel, star Brie Larson’s outspoken feminism and likely the fact that it’s the first MCU movie to have a woman lead means that internet trolls are doing their best to damage the film’s reputation. First, users swarmed Rotten Tomatoes in an attempt to decrease its score, leading to RT to disable user reviews prior to a movie’s release. Now, evidence suggests the same thing is happening over on IMDb.
Marvel movies typically enjoy pretty healthy scores in the early days of their runs, but Captain Marvel sits at a score of just 5.6 at the time of writing. Sure, part of this is because of the film’s response being somewhat mixed so far, but if you look at the breakdown of user reviews, it begins to appear like this aggregated rating doesn’t paint an honest picture of what people think of Carol Danvers’ cinematic debut.
Many people love Captain Marvel, of course, with 1,641 users giving it a perfect 10 score. The next highest numbers though are 8 and 7, with 616 and 576 users apiece. So, it’s clear that the general portrait suggests CM has gone down fairly well. Things get confusing, however, when you realize that most users have given the film a 1 – the counter currently sits at 1,994. Naturally, this extreme number of the lowest possible rating brings the overall medium well below what it otherwise would be.
It’s also worth pointing out that of the users who’ve rated CM so far, 3,669 of them are male and just 406 are women. Now, obviously no one’s saying that all women will love Captain Marvel while all men hate it, but it is a fact that most of the trolls attacking the film are men. It stands to reason, then, that if there was a more equal sampling, IMDb’s score might more accurately reflect the predominant opinion on Marvel Studios’ latest.
Thankfully, there’s not long to wait until we can make up our own minds, as Captain Marvel blasts into theaters this Friday, March 8th.