Two anonymous Disney executives reported the company had taken steps to “mitigate any troll effect on “Captain Marvel.”
In a story in North Jersey, a subsidiary of USA Today, two anonymous Disney executives allegedly spoke to the paper confirming Disney had taken steps to “mitigate any troll effect on Captain Marvel.” North Jersey reports Disney has “become more adept and prepared for combating organized negativity around a release. There are no more sneak attacks.”
The paper then goes on to cite that YouTube adjusted their algorithms for Captain Marvel and classified “brie larson” searches as news instead of general. As we previously reported, this change pushed more positive coverage of Brie Larson and Disney’s Captain Marvel to the top of YouTube searches and pushed negative coverage of the actress and film to the bottom.
Not only does the article cite YouTube algorithm changes, but they also point to Rotten Tomatoes changing their “Want to See” score. However, they falsely conflate the “Want To See” score with the actual “Audience Score.” Not only did, Rotten Tomatoes remove their “Want To See” score after a number of fans indicated they were uninterested in seeing the movie, but after the movie was released, the review aggregate site also deleted some 50,000 reviews that appeared to increase the “Audience Score.”
The confirmation of Disney taking steps to “mitigate any troll effect on Captain Marvel” comes after a SyFy Wire’s Dany Roth admitted that media outlets create fake reviews in order to maintain access to the movie studios and celebrities.
“Here’s the actual reality. Here’s where we actually are in the industry if you want to talk about quote access media. Every single person that wants to have access to things early, that wants to get access to things so that traffic is drawn to their site will on occasion. Everybody at this podcast, everybody in our industry occasionally has to play softball, occasionally has to look the other way a little bit. Everybody has to do it. In the sense that I hated a movie, but I won’t say that I hated a movie. Or an actor behaved a sort of way, and you don’t want to put it out there that that happened.”
He concludes:
“To some degree everybody in our industry that is part of this quote on quote access media has to decide which battles they want to pick. Which of the ones where my voice is the one that has to get said.”
Cosmic Book News also reports that entertainment site Deadline has “also been inflating box office numbers for Captain Marvel in every one of their articles.”
We’ve also seen reports of numerous empty theaters from people who went to see Captain Marvel. We also spoke to a movie theater manager, who told us his theater had “exactly 25 no shows for every showing of Captain Marvel on Thursday through Saturday” during its opening weekend. Meaning these were purchased tickets, where people did not show up. He explained to us that this was not normal and guessed that the reason for the no shows was that “it’s someone trying to make the ticket sales look better than they really were.”
Captain Marvel reportedly earned $153 million at the domestic box office in its opening weekend. Box Office Mojo reports the film has currently grossed over $760 million worldwide.
What do you make of this report indicating that Disney took action to “mitigate any troll effect on Captain Marvel?” What kind of action do you think they took?