ROTTEN TOMATOES YANKS VIEWERS’ COMMENTS ABOUT DARK KNIGHT RISES

After being deluged with angry and sometimes vicious responses to a handful of early negative reviews of The Dark Knight Rises, RottenTomatoes.com has removed user comments about the movie — its first such action since the site was created in 1999. It is owned by Flixster, which was acquired by Warner Bros. in May of last year. Warner Bros. is also the company that produced and is distributing The Dark Knight Rises, which has received overwhelmingly positive reviews to date. But a review by veteran critic Marshall Fine drew 460 angry comments before they were yanked, including one from a person who said that Fine should “die in a fire” and another in which the writer said he wanted to beat Fine “into a coma.” In an interview with the Associated Press, Matt Atchity, the site’s editor-in-chief said, “The job of policing the comments became more than my staff could handle for that film, so we stopped the comments altogether. … It just got to be too much hate based on reactions to reviews of movies that people hadn’t even seen.”