Suicide Squad Reviews Not So Hot, Fans Petition to Shut Down Rotten Tomatoes

Posted by on August 3rd, 2016   Filed under: Fandom, Industry News

suicidesquadreviews

We’re one day away from Suicide Squad arriving in theatres and yesterday the first wave of reviews hit the internet accordingly. Unfortunately, the results were not pretty: the movie currently sits at 33% on Rotten Tomatoes and critically it seems to be faring only slightly better than Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The movie is still expected to easily produce the biggest August opening weekend ever and is now on track to earn $140 million or more, but this is not good news for Warner Brothers, who really needed to prove that the DC Cinematic Universe was in good hands. So what happened? Did the final product really miss the mark so badly? Not surprisingly, some fans are refusing to believe it and instead they are lashing out against film critics and Rotten Tomatoes itself. Hit the jump for more details.

According to a petition on Change.org, there are currently 12,500 people who would like to see Rotten Tomatoes shut down because it provides “unjust Bad Reviews” that “Affects people’s opinion even if it’s a really great movies.” Apparently they are choosing to overlook the fact that Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t actually write the reviews, it simply collects them all in one place. I suppose you could argue that the site has had a negative impact on film criticism by amplifying the general consensus and minimizing outlying opinions, but it’s pretty hard to see this petition as having any merit behind it at all.

While this is clearly a ridiculous request from a small group of angry and frustrated fans, it does illustrate the growing divide between moviegoers and film critics. Granted, most of these people probably still haven’t seen the movie, but fans do not trust critics — especially ones who are not familiar with the source material. Do you think critics have something against the DC universe? Are all of the Marvel movies simply better than the recent DC movies or is there something else going on here? Do you still plan on seeing Suicide Squad this weekend?



  • Jr

    I haven’t seen this so I’m not commenting on The Suicide Squad but generally I think critics just have something against bad movies.

  • Frankie Knuckles

    Signed … this movement has been a LONE time coming

  • I feel like I can trust RT over IMDB for a film’s cinema run, IMDB always has a ridiculous spike at the beginning. 8.2 now, probably will be 6.9 in a month. And because BvS was so shit, without good reviews first, I’m skipping this. DC just sucks on the screen, there is only Chris Nolan and the Wonder Woman song that is any good.
    Fanboys outweigh critics in numbers so whatevs.

  • Dstrbpx

    That change.org link is hilarious.
    The mastery of the English language brought to you straight from a million adult virgins in their parents´ basements.

  • 1138sw

    I haven’t seen the movie yet but based on the movie reviews that I read it seems like a typical Ayers movie…some great scenes but overall disjointed and uneven.

    I like Ayers too but there are times I think WTF was he thinking…and sometimes his dialogue and directing can be a little over the time top and to melodramatic. Though when he hits the mark he really hits the mark.

  • Balls

    Hot take!

  • These type of die-hards are usually the first to speak out if they don’t like one of these movies with a million fucking articles about how the studio dropped the ball, or strayed from source, or bad casting. I’m just hoping this movie will be half as fun as its trailers.

  • Primal

    Hilarious that it’s this movie that would get fanboys pissed at RT. Clint Eastwood’s calling us the “pussy generation” is in effect with this cry to shutdown RT. Liberal Hollywood has no shame in it’s bias and how they own the critics too. Just look at Hillary’s America critic vs. audience score. Trust the critics who have similar taste in films as you do and think for yourself.

  • RockJoker

    I guess some people don’t understand the concept of an aggregator site. RT is shit, though.

  • Hillary’s America (or any other right or left wing political movie) is not a good example of a gap between critics & audiences actually meaning anything. Critics are ideally looking at a movie through a far different lens than a bunch of far right or left wingers watching a hit piece on their ‘enemy’ or when they’re watching a fluff piece glorifying their side.

    As for the Suicide Squad issue at hand, the fans need to go after the studio and tell them to make a better damn movie as opposed to the critics who pan it.

  • Dammit I just was reminded that this is a David Ayer film, I’ve enjoyed his films lately so now I don’t know what to do…

  • Primal

    You sound like a guy who hasn’t read any of the RT critic reviews let alone watched Hillary’s America. FYI, it’s an expose film showing the history of the democratic party and D’Souza’s experience in jail. All the facts presented in the film can’t be debunked by the critics because they are all actually true and they still give it a negative rating.

    You are living in a fantasy world if you think that politics can’t be part of a critic’s “lens” when reviewing a film.

  • Lori Cerny

    Um, sorry Sean, the change.org petition was started as a joke. Read the comments by the person who created the petition, Abdullah Coldwater:

    PETITION UPDATE
    Clarification
    Abdullah Coldwater
    Alexandria, Egypt

    AUG 3, 2016 — First : Thank you very much for reaching more than 5000 supporter

    Second A Clarification : A petition definitely won’t shut down the site

    The aim of the petition is to deliver a message to the critics that there is a lot of people disagree with their reviews.

    A lot of people the supporters and the opponents of the petition act like we are already going right now to shut down the site

    not it’s just a way to express our anger

    ************************************************************

    PETITION UPDATE

    Final Announcement
    Abdullah Coldwater
    Alexandria, Egypt

    AUG 3, 2016 — In fact i started this petition to gather dc fans to express our anger just for fun. I didn’t mean it to be taken that serious.

    After thinking. I found this petition is pointless. And the only thing that it does is spreading a speech of hate and online fighting among the supporters and objectors . The movies is something to enjoy. And the hate and fight is the opposite of enjoying.

    And after watching this videos

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q5tC4hfw8SM

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ujwbadkmBCQ

    I made my mind to end this petition

    For contact this is twitter and facebook

    https://twitter.com/AbdullahCold

    https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100011743508177

  • Lori Cerny

    Sean, maybe you should take the next journalistic step and contact Coldwater for an interview.

  • Sean

    Oh sure, now it’s a joke! Now that everyone is making fun of him…

  • Sean

    We definitely gotta get this guy on the podcast.

  • Nick Poliskey

    It’s at 29%. I was planning on seeing it, but that just kept my butt out of the theatre. I take RT seriously.

  • Colin

    The Comic Con trailer looks like butt, so what did they expect? It’s a generic hot dog of a movie, made to fill your belly as cheaply as possible until the next time you’re hungry for garbage.

  • Stinker

    Shoot the
    messenger was always a good strategy. And what’s comes next, frustrated Transformer
    Fans joining forces with frustrated DC Fans?

  • I’ve read enough of the reviews actually, not every one word for word, but the trailer does no service to making a case for watching this movie. The re-enactments look like cliched garbage, the shots of Dinesh looking at a wall of ‘evidence’ likes he’s uncovered some grand plan (mostly just pictures torn from magazines and one page internet articles, groundbreaking stuff right there! Seriously, that wall is what you’d get from an 8 year old doing a school project on Hillary…)

    My favorite is when he’s walking and just barely touching the file boxes, as though he is mystically gaining all the info in each file through some alien brain trick… If I would have only known in college I could just walk through the library and touch the spines of books I would have been done in months with 3 degrees!

  • Primal

    Hehe, okay, I’ll give you that. There are quite a few cheesy shots like that in the film. In that part of the movie, they do a one-shot steadicam of him infiltrating a Hillary campaign staff building and then goes off on Hillary’s past which I found real intriguing.

  • Lori Cerny

    Did you read the letter that he sent to Rotten Tomatoes?

    If not, take two seconds and look at it. I’d post it here, but it’s a pop-up.

  • DrewNugent

    Preach it brotha!

  • Jameson

    I do think this petition is dumb and I plan on seeing Suicide Squad and forming my own opinion rather than tremble at what others are saying. But I think the frustration channeled at RT as making a “consensus” is due to the fact that numbers like 29% suggest the worst thing ever when really it’s a hyperbolic percentage. If you look at the reviews, not everyone says SS is completely terrible but based on the number score it would seem it is. I understand that all they’re doing is culminating all reviews into a consensus, but everything comes off more extreme than it should. Which leads to the clickbait trends of articles around the internet simply talking about reviewers not liking a movie rather than giving any insightful opinion.

  • RockJoker

    Watched it yesterday. It was garbage with some awesomness sprinkled here and there.

  • Glen

    I’m far too cynical to believe this is legitimate.
    Don’t you think this is just another way the studios are marketing this movie? Hire a PR firm to create a fake petition on Change.org to generate even more buzz for the film. It wouldn’t be that difficult. Unlike other marketing efforts this rises above the usual din of press junkets and movie reviews.
    It resulted in a Canadian movie podcast to post another entry for Suicide Squad didn’t it?

  • No one important

    Movie reviews have never stopped me from going to see a movie. They have, however, got me interested in a film I may have not known about before. I won’t be passing on Suicide Squad because of bad reviews. The reason I wont be seeing it is because it’s a super hero movie and I’m so bloody sick of them. I have had enough. I’m not going to see super hero movies anymore. There’s a line, on one side are the humans who watch super hero movies and on the other side is me….. Come and join me.

  • Other than Guardians of the Galaxy, I’m on your side. I have little interest in BvS, X-Men, Cap America, Thor, etc… Though I will probably watch all these movies at some point, it’ll most likely be via Redbox or my local library (not the figurative ‘library’ bright up so often)

  • Nightman

    Had some fun momemts, but mostly a piece of shit.

  • Theo

    Suicide Squad isn’t a superhero… it’s a super villain film.

  • Theo

    Then you’re a sheep. I guess you must be one of the ones liked the Ghostbusters remake, because Rotten Tomatoes told you it was good… or that Indiana Jones 4 and Ang Lee’s Hulk really deserved a 61% fresh score. Sheep are sad af. Cause they believe whatever others tell them, without making their own mind up and forming their own opinion.

  • Theo

    Well they gave praise to Ghostbusters ffs…. so I’m not so sure.