Film Review Sites Faking Their Ratings?

The latest Disney live-action remake of an animated classic,“The Little Mermaid”, might not be as well-regarded by audiences as we were led to believe-- and it appears that review sites are providing cover for the Disney flick.

Film industry reporters have been blogging about whistleblowers from sites such as Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes and Internet Movie Database. Apparently, IMDB activated an “alternate weighting calculation” to compensate for alleged “unusual activity” in reviews for “The Little Mermaid”. The IMDB page warns visitors, “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title. To preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied.” A true average of the ratings gives ‘Little Mermaid’ a 4.6/10 from audiences, while the “official” weighted average gives the film a 7/10 rating. That’s a big difference.

Of course, the obvious reason for them to behave in this manner is to combat the inevitable “review-bombing” that was going to occur against the film, which was due to the casting of Ariel with black actress Halle Bailey. This “review bombing” campaign, according to IMDB, led to more than 40% of the film’s ratings being one-star ratings, spanning multiple countries. So, if there was a campaign to downgrade the film’s rating, it did not just exclusively occur in the United States, but rather in dozens of countries across the globe.

Its not just IMDB. Rotten Tomatoes seem to have also adjusted their user ratings to boost “The Little Mermaid.” Forbes noticed the anomalies and wrote a whole piece about it. According to that article, The live-action remake of The Little Mermaid is now scoring much higher with audiences than the 1989 animated classic, which sits at 88% with audiences and 92% with critics. Are we to believe that moviegoers love the remake even more than the original? That certainly wasn’t the case with Beauty and the Beast, which fared better with critics and audiences as a cartoon by a wide margin.

“The Little Mermaid” currently has a 56% user rating when compared to the 95% score from its “verified audience.” Rotten Tomatoes picked and chose the reviews they deemed acceptable for the film. Not a very democratic way to conduct the aggregate. So, what’s happening? The theory is that these review aggregate sites want to protect themselves from the race-swapping casting backlash. However, these sites are artificially creating the impression that the film is universally liked.

Then again, if you’re not “cooking” the books like RT and IMDB are doing and are instead, honestly, counting every user “review” then the result will be what Metacritic has tallied: a user score of 2.2/10. What the likes of Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic can’t really control is publication reviews. Critics have been more lukewarm towards the film — “The Little Mermaid” has a 68 on Rotten Tomatoes and 59 on Metacritic.