With all of the excitement surrounding the upcoming release of The Dark Knight Rises, a few commenters on review-aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes got a bit out of hand — so out of hand, in fact, that the film's review comment section had to be temporarily shut down. The decision was made after the first negative reviews of the film hit the site, which resulted in threatening comments made towards the authors of those reviews. Initially the team at Rotten Tomatoes simply monitored the comments on the negative reviews, but eventually it became an overwhelming task.

"You'll have to stand by your comments."

"The job of policing the comments became more than my staff could handle for that film, so we stopped the comments altogether," Rotten Tomatoes EIC Matt Atchity told the Associated Press, explaining that this was the first occasion in which the site had suspended user comments. In a blog post, Atchity said that the comments would be disabled for "a few days," and explained that the site may move to Facebook-based comments in the future to avoid anonymity. "You'll have to stand by your comments, just like a critic does," he wrote. "So you'll still be able to argue about a movie you haven't seen, but people will know it was you."