IMDb changes ratings after Little Mermaid backlash

IMDb changes ratings after Little Mermaid backlash

Review bombing is a strange aspect of the state of cinema in the Internet age. The term refers specifically to the phenomenon of users posting negative reviews of a film in order to lower its average rating. Review bombers often haven’t seen the film that they’re negatively reviewing…

And what is the term when you get just created accounts and their first/only power gives 100% positive reviews?

IMDb protects them!

“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,”

When a movie is SOOOoo bad, and the majority of people dislike the product from a “protected film”, IMDb changes things.  They did it for Brei “cardboard” Larson’s Captain Marvel.  They are doing it again for another Disney film.

“Although we accept and consider all votes received by users, not all votes have the same impact (or ‘weight’) on the final rating. When unusual voting activity is detected, an alternate weighting calculation may be applied in order to preserve the reliability of our system.”

As some people have shown, when they changed it for Captain Marvel, only those that purchased via a site they can verify bought a ticket for that film (if you bought your ticket through a provider like Fandango, AMC, or Cinemark — which all signed up to participate in Rotten Tomatoes’ verification program and signed in with that account), gets to make an audience score (they cannot verify the ticket purchaser ACTUALLY watched the film, or if you paid cash, or where part of a group and only the account that made the payment is considered verified ).

Now they have taken one step further with verified audience scores (those their system accepts) and then after some looking you can find a TOTAL AUDIENCE SCORE.

How exactly IMDb is weighing these reviews, and what considerations are being taken to decide which review is weighted how, is unclear. (In fact, IMDB declines to “disclose the exact method used to generate the rating” in order to “ensure that our rating mechanism remains effective.”)

IMDb is actively censoring the reviews/scores they don’t like to INFLATE the score above what it actually is, IMO.

There is no way that Rotten Tomatoes’ 95% or Metacritic’s 2.1 are accurate reflections of what people are actually saying about this movie in the real world.

Since RT has long been an unreliable scoring site, and I am not familiar with MC, even if we average them out (58%) seems more realistic.  (But I still don’t trust those inflated RT numbers.)

From all the people I know, from their feedback, the MC score is more accurately reflects reality on this film.