It was announced this week that popular movie rating site Rotten Tomatoes would be withholding their Justice League score until this Thursday when the movie hits theaters, but now, it looks like the score has leaked and it's not pretty. Justice League is one of the most anticipated releases of the year and the hype surrounding the movie that brings Batman and crew together has been immense, but controversy has also been almost as high as the hype. While most fans are just looking to see some Justice League reviews, others are looking to trash the movie before they even see it.
Early reviews of Justice League have been skewed to say the least. Our own Julian Roman says that the movie "does not suck," but that's not exactly a glowing review or even one that makes a casual moviegoer want to jump into a seat to watch it. Vanity Fair flat out said that it's a, "bad movie," while Entertainment Weekly boldly proclaimed that, "Justice League is not as bad as Batman v Superman." It seems that holding back the Rotten Tomatoes score was by design and may be the trend moving forward.
A Reddit user posted a screen shot of the Justice League score, showing that it currently sits with a 48% Rotten rating. Though the score is hidden on the Rotten Tomatoes website, it must be available through the site's APIs, because the movie app Flixster was displaying the Rotten Tomatoes score for Justice League earlier today. The score has since been removed from the Flixster app without reasoning and seems to have been a mistake. The current Metacritic rating as of this writing is at 51 out of 100 and the aggregated reviews are all over the map, with Richard Roeper's review coming in at 88/100, and the New York Times review ranked at 40/100.
For most movies, a 48% Rotten score would be bad news (it's not quite the 0% that The Emoji Movie first earned), but compared to the respective 26% and 27% ratings of Suicide Squad and Batman v Superman, it's actually much better, but that isn't really saying much. The score will change in time as more people get out and see it and it will no doubt crush at the box office, but it doesn't seem like it's destined for the critical praise that Wonder Woman received over the summer. There are fans that have been sticking up for the project since day one, so we'll have to wait a little while longer to see where the movie ends up comparing to the rest of the DCEU.
While the CGI might be a big point of contention for everybody, Justice League will more than likely be a homerun for DC fans and when it comes down to it, that's all that matters. Comic book movie adaptations have always had to fight upstream for some critical recognition and Justice League is no different. You can check out the screen shot from Flixster below, courtesy of Reddit.
