Snow White
Every time the idea that a movie or show is being review-bombed comes up, there is always a contingent of people who say that no, this thing really is that bad, everyone rating it saw it, and this is all perfectly legitimate.
Well, in the case of Snow White, IMDB would seem to disagree.
Snow White has 284,000 reviews come in, with 91% of them being one star, which makes its final total a 1.5/10. That is not just the lowest for any major blockbuster in history, but looking at IMDB’s all-time bottom films, it’s almost one of the worst-rated period.
The obvious illegitimacy of this has caused IMDB to put up an actual warning on the ratings page, saying that its “rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title.” That’s a note you do not see often unless something incredibly extreme is happening. I’m reminded of the instance of when Captain Marvel was bombed so badly by supposed viewers (again, due to comments its actress had made) that Rotten Tomatoes had to invent its “verified audience” metric where users have to prove on some level they’d watched the film. Using that metric, incidentally, the RT audience score for Snow White is a perfectly fine 74%. IMDB has no such system in place.
Snow White
People pushing back on all this have noted that hey, this isn’t a good movie, with its 40% critic score putting it at the bottom of Disney live-action adaptations. Absolutely, sure, it is likely the case that Snow White isn’t good, albeit the general public seems to like it more than critics.
But no one seems to recognize the scale of this. There are hundreds if not thousands of movie with 40% critic scores. They are not review-bombed into being one of the worst-rated movies in history, a distinct honor for Snow White alone. The movie has as many reviews in less than two weeks as the most-popular live-action Disney film, The Lion King, has gotten in its entire lifespan. That is not normal.
Again, this entire thing is happening mainly due to a campaign against Rachel Zegler, deemed enemy #1 for a certain crowd. This has happened from the start, her race deemed not appropriate to play Snow White, her suggestion that the source material (90 years old) was not relevant enough in its current form for present day, and her tweets supporting Palestine in the current conflict. But in the wake of this, other actors have offered support to her, including most recently the busiest man in Hollywood, Pedro Pascal, who called her an “icon” on Instagram.
Will IMDB actually delete ratings it feels are illegitimate? I don’t know. That seems unlikely, and that would spawn another round of “IMDB is deleting ratings to protect Snow White!” alarmist stories that would only continue the narrative. But at least at this point, it should be recognized this is very much review-bombing and anyone saying otherwise is being willfully ignorant.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
