IMDb Is Rigging Reviews for ‘The Little Mermaid’You can alter the audience scores of a terrible movie, but it’s still a terrible movie.
By Tim Young
May 31, 2023
The box office numbers and audience reviews for “woke” movies have been tanking—and efforts to negate that problem are clearly part of the Hollywood machine’s promotion budget these days. This has never been more obvious than in the case of the live-action release of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid.”
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb), one of the top sites people turn to in order to decide whether or not they want to see a film, has taken unorthodox measures to curb the influx of terrible reviews the movie is getting.
In the audience review section for the Disney film, IMDB added the note:
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.
So, because the audience doesn’t like the film at such a high rate, the website has decided that it should alter the actual review numbers to make it look like the people like the movie, after all.
Deadline reported IMDb added a note that not all votes have the same weight on the final rating, but they didn’t want to say how they calculated the score. Essentially, IMDb admits they decided to alter the numbers in an arbitrary way.
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How did this impact the final rating of the film? As of this writing, “The Little Mermaid” on IMDb has over 34,000 ratings, of which roughly 14,000 (or 40.6 percent) are one-stars. Yet the average score, according to the site, is a seven out of 10. In short, it doesn’t matter if the majority of viewers—or even a plurality—didn’t like the new film. Their opinion no longer matters to IMDb. It gets a seven because they say so.
It’s interesting to think about why the site took such steps to alter the rating system in just this instance. It didn’t just magically happen, of course. Just as the influx of thousands of positive reviews for “The Little Mermaid” skewed the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes to 95 percent positive, what we’re really seeing is Disney marketing magic.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/31/imdb-is-rigging-reviews-for-the-little-mermaid/
