Note to Self: Don’t antagonize Batman fans. That’s a lesson one film critic learned the hard way after his negative review for The Dark Knight Rises resulted in death threats and vows to destroy his website.
Marshall Fine was the first critic to give The Dark Knight Rises a negative review. In doing so, he broke the film’s streak at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer.”
The reaction from franchise fans was over-the-top to say the least. As reported by Matt Singer from Indiewire, comments at Rotten Tomatoes and at Fine’s site included death wishes and threats to torch his website.
The situation was bad enough that Rotten Tomatoes Editor-in-Chief Matt Atchity had to respond to the situation in a blog post titled, “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.”
In the post, Atchity condemned the negative commenters and temporarily removed the link at Fine’s request (the massive traffic took down Fine’s server temporarily). Atchity took things a step further and disabled all comments on The Dark Knight Rises reviews for a few days.
Ridiculous.
Fortunately, one person in this inane situation is acting like an adult. In an interview with Indiewire, Fine had good humor about the situation. “It doesn’t hurt my feelings,” Fine said about the comments. “You have to have a thick skin if you’re going to be offering your opinion out to the public.”
Meanwhile, the film has managed to garner five additional negative or “Rotten” ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. The film’s current ranking sits at 85% fresh.
