“Trolls, uh, find a way.” While obviously referring to dinosaurs, this phrase is true of both fictitious thunderlizards and trolls. Even though both creatures are adept at ruining a good time, the biggest difference between the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and real-life trolls is that trolls are mostly male. Captain Marvel isn’t the first and it will not be the last in a long line of targets chosen by mostly toxic males who, because of various insecurities, feel diminished that Captain Marvel even exists.
To be clear, this isn’t an article about people who simply don’t want to see this movie, or even about people who have legitimate problems with the movie as a narrative. This is about people who’ve gone out of their way to campaign against this film before it’s even been released to general audiences.
It’s not difficult to find a patterned bias against this movie. Looking at the first YouTube trailer that was published by Marvel Entertainment, we get a taste by looking at the stats. Dropped in September of 2018, the trailer has 52 million views, 1 million likes and 93k dislikes. Nearly 10% of the people that viewed this trailer disliked it.
Related – Rotten Tomatoes Makes Changes In Wake Of Captain Marvel Fiasco
It would be easy to say that maybe people didn’t like the trailer, but moving to the comments below the trailer, we get a glimpse of where the true animus lies. Brie Larson is criticized for her voice, bashed for her “politics,” people stating that they “prefer the original Captain Marvel.” The list goes on.
Let’s go back to the metrics and compare them to Avengers: Endgame. With 89 million views, Endgame received 3.2 million likes and 43k dislikes. For those counting, that’s 1.6 percent. I couldn’t find a single comment criticizing anyone, despite some of the actors in the film being quite vocal politically.
It’s difficult to state with any certainty the genesis of the disdain for the film or the actress, but one could surmise it started with comments reported by Vanity Fair in June 2018:
“Am I saying that I hate white dudes? No, I’m not. What I am saying is if you make a movie that is a love letter to a woman of color, there is an insanely low chance that a woman of color will have a chance to see your movie and review your movie. It really sucks that reviews matter, but reviews matter. We are expanding to make films that reflect the people who buy movie tickets . . . I do not need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work for him about A Wrinkle in Time. It wasn’t made for him.”
Larson doubled down on these sentiments when speaking with Marie Claire in February 2019:
“About a year ago, I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white male. So, I spoke to Dr Stacy Smith at the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, who put together a study to confirm that. Moving forward, I decided to make sure my press days were more inclusive.”
Who’s to say whether or not the YouTube dislikes stemmed from the Vanity Fair comments, but it’s apparent that quite a few of the more recent comments are in direct response to a combination of these two interviews. People saying that this movie wasn’t for them because they’re male and white.
This is an incredibly reductive and childish response. Laron said nothing about the audience seeing the film. She was interested in expanding the pool of people reporting on and reviewing movies so there is a full spectrum of individuals covering films.
To her point, the analysis done by USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found that with reviews of top releases, only 22.2% were written by women, with 82% of critics white.
It would seem as though her initial comments weren’t clear enough because the headlines that followed were less than kind. Even the interviewer who asked her for comment stated that within context, what she said was a good thing. During that interview, Larson went on to clarify:
“What I’m looking for is to bring more seats up to the table. No one is getting their chair taken away. There’s not less seats at the table, there’s just more seats at the table.”
The clarification didn’t matter and the second avenue of attack against this movie was the Rotten Tomatoes “want to see score.” Trolls bombed the film to the point where the score dipped below 51%. The reaction was so bad, that Rotten Tomatoes actually stepped in:
“As of February 25, we will no longer show the ‘Want to See’ percentage score for a movie during its pre-release period. Why you might ask? We’ve found that the ‘Want to See’ percentage score is often times confused with the ‘Audience Score’ percentage number.”
It’s both sad and interesting that RT didn’t step in because the behavior was decidedly toxic. RT was likely concerned about their bottom line because when things like this happen, one of the prevalent responses is, “why do we care about Rotten Tomatoes?”
As I said in the beginning, trolls are resilient little things and have “found a way.” Shifting from the Rotten Tomatoes “Want to See” score, they’ve begun review bombing on IMDb prior to the film’s actual release. As of this writing (which is slightly ahead of the movie’s release), there are 13.8k reviews and a whopping 27% of them are a 1/10. An additional 15.6% of the reviews are between 2 and 6 out of 10. That’s marvelous work for a movie that hasn’t been released to general audiences yet. (Again, worth noting by the time of this writing, it wasn’t released yet)
Plus, since the film has been released, the bombing on RT has commenced, as evidenced in this image.
The negative fervor around Captain Marvel film has even lead SHAZAM! star, Zachery Levi, to post on IG live, calling out trolls for their toxic behavior, imploring them to stop pitting the films against one another or review bombing Captain Marvel because they weren’t helping SHAZAM! or Warner Bros. His pleas are likely to fall on deaf ears, but calling out toxic behavior is always the right thing to do.
Interestingly, Wonder Woman was equally poised to create similar amounts of hate within the fandom and for the briefest of moments, I wondered (heh) why it wasn’t similarly targeted, but then I remembered a few things.
The first was that Gal Gadot was derided as being too skinny the moment her casting was announced. Questions about her power or strength ignored the fact that, depending on the comic, Diana was either molded out of clay or the daughter of Hippolyta and Zeus, making her physical size and muscle mass irrelevant.
The other relevant fact is that within the movie universe, Wonder Woman was not the most powerful character. She’s a skilled fighter, but Superman was able to handle her and the rest of the Justice League on his own (feel free to argue how much she might have been holding back in the comments).
From the beginning, even before Larson was cast, Kevin Feige told IGN that Captain Marvel “will be by far the most powerful character we’ve ever introduced in the movies.” Couple those comments with the outspoken nature of Larson, who has expressed interest in leading an all-female Avengers team, and you can see where this is headed. As the old guard leaves, Larson/Captain Marvel will be a leader, if not the leader of the team.
This is the real problem for trolls. Captain Marvel is being positioned to be one of the most powerful characters in the MCU, possibly the face of the next phase of the MCU and Avengers and she’s being played by a woman who didn’t mince words when speaking about the lack of diversity among movie reviewers and interviewers. This is about the insecurity of people who think they’re going to be left behind and feel insulted by her comments. To those that feel that way, I don’t want to be dismissive, so I’ll ask: show me on the doll where Brie Larson hurt your ego.
The truth is, diversity in Marvel movies will only continue to snowball, regardless of whether the actors are vocal about the characters or the press that interact with the films. Aside from Captain Marvel, Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie stole the show in Thor: Ragnarok, Evangeline Lily’s Wasp was the first female hero to headline an MCU film, Marvel seems to use the Dora Milaje as often as they can, Black Widow is getting her own film and The Eternals looking to cast an openly gay male lead.
The existence of these films and characters don’t diminish anyone in any way. Brie Larson’s comments about bringing more voices to the table, similarly, harm no one. If trolls are truly offended by these developments, they should engage in a bit of introspection or they’ll lose the one advantage they have over dinosaurs, who can’t help being what they are.
What do you think? Let us know your thoughts down below or on twitter @lrm_exclusive and @sirjonesiest.
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Sources: IGN, YouTube (1), (2), (3), Twitter, Vanity Fair, Marie Claire
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