Rotten Tomatoes Is Withholding Its Justice League Score Until Thursday

With the lone exception of Wonder Woman, the movies from DC Films and Warner Bros. haven’t enjoyed a lot of critical success. Followers of the shared cinematic universe were then eagerly anticipating the reviews for the forthcoming Justice League, utilizing aggregator Rotten Tomatoes as an indicator of its quality. But strangely enough, despite the review embargo lifting on Tuesday, Rotten Tomatoes will not reveal their percentage score until Thursday, during their weekly show See It/Skip It.

Rotten Tomatoes is co-owned by Warner Bros., leading some fans to believe that the studio was expecting a critical beating—but more likely is that the decision is to create hype for the platform’s new online show. One of the show’s features is a “Tomatometer Score Reveal,” and this week, the subject of the segment is the highly anticipated Justice League. The show’s previous reveal was A Bad Moms Christmas.

Despite this, fans can obviously still check out the reviews themselves. While Rotten Tomatoes has none of the reviews posted on their website, a quick visit to Metacritic shows several gathered reviews, mainly on the mixed side. As of this writing, the averaged Metacritic score is a not-so-bad-but-not-so-good 51. Rotten Tomatoes scores films differently, instead calculating the percentage of positive reviews out of total reviews. The reviews so far tout the film’s energy and humor (as opposed to the dour Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice), but cite poor CGI, messy storytelling and a mediocre villain.

Visits to websites like Fandango generally display the Rotten Tomatoes score to better inform moviegoers, but those looking to buy advance tickets for Justice League will not have that luxury. Films with bad reviews generally translate into bad box-office returns, as a dire summer for the box office displayed. For that reason, this strange delay of revealing this number that DC fans seem to care a lot for is quite suspect. As Suicide Squad has demonstrated, DC film fans have a long and contentious relationship with the website.

Justice League will hit theaters this Friday, Nov. 17. Stay tuned to Paste for our own review.