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Star Wars Fans Freaking Out Over The Rise Of Skywalker’s Rotten Tomatoes Score

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Innovation, imagination, humor – three things you won’t find in great abundance within Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

At least, that’s according to the first wave of reviews that have swept Rotten Tomatoes (read our own thoughts here), all of which have amounted to a measly Tomatometer Score of just 58 percent at the time of writing. For the sake of perspective, only The Phantom Menace has scored below 60 percent across all mainline Star Wars films. Even the decidedly average Solo scored 70 percent on the review aggregator.

To date, 189 reviews have been counted by Rotten Tomatoes for The Rise of Skywalker, 79 of which are ‘rotten’, with the rest (110) being rated as ‘fresh.’ The official consensus from RT reads as so: “[Episode IX] suffers from a frustrating lack of imagination, but concludes this beloved saga with fan-focused devotion.”

And let’s just say Star Wars fans have posted some interesting reactions online:

Keep in mind that this figure (i.e. 58 percent) only represents the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator; whether the Audience Score will fall within a similar ballpark will be revealed over the course of the weekend. Viewers will naturally draw comparisons between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, given the former blockbuster received near-unanimous praise among critics (91 percent RT score), only to divide fans across the globe, resulting in an Audience Score of just 43 percent. Ouch.

Will the opposite be true of Episode IX? Which is to say that the Audience Score may well be higher than the critical consensus. We’ll find out very soon indeed.

We’ll be able to see for ourselves once Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker makes its way into theaters all across the globe this coming weekend. Box office analysts predict a suitably huge three-day opening in the States ($200M), but the question remains: will Episode IX‘s lifetime tally suffer as a result of these polarizing reviews? Time will tell.