How much free time do you have? Well,
there’s a person out there on Facebook that has plenty of it, since he claims to have spent the weekend ruining the audience score for Star Wars: The Last Jedi on Rotten Tomatoes.
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Update Dec 17, 5:15 PST – On diving into a comparison between rate of reviews on other current releases and recent blockbusters, we noted a few abnormalities.
For instance in The Shape of Water, there are a number of audience reviews where the review copy is for Last Jedi, not Shape of Water. This only lasted for a relatively brief time, but over a span of several users. It reads as if someone might have misconfigured a bot.
Shape of Water Review Scores:
In addition, comparing the user review rate between Last Jedi and Thor, we noticed that Last Jedi already has far more than Thor does. While Thor had been slowing to only about a dozen reviews per day in recent weeks,
as of Jedi’s opening, the number of Thor reviews have skyrocketed. Many of which are by the newly-created accounts which did a low score for Jedi, then immediately turning around and doing a Thor review.
Comparing that user behavior with other film release, something feels atypical to say the least. If it’s a coordinated campaign or a bot farm, however, remains to be seen. The possibility remains that there is simply an army of individuals all racing to do their very first reviews ever for Jedi, but the more we dig into this the more it feels manipulated.
We have reached out to Rotten Tomatoes for comment.
(Last Updated December 17, 2017 7:24 pm )