With a current audience approval rating of 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing, it would be easy to think that The Little Mermaid has managed to avoid the review-bombing campaign everyone fully expected to launch at the exact moment the latest Disney live-action remake landed in theaters.
Even on IMDb, director Rob Marshall’s sub-aquatic spectacular is carrying a solid 7/10 score from upwards of 13,000 votes, but that doesn’t come anywhere close to telling the whole story. In fact, if you dig a little deeper, it transpires that the website has actively put a stop to trolls and detractors trying to whittle down the movie’s score.
When you dive into The Little Mermaid‘s actual ratings, the first thing that you’ll see is a disclaimer warning that “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,” which is the official party line for “Not today, review-bombers.”
While only 13,000 ratings are being officially acknowledged, over 46 percent of all votes cast on IMDb thus far have offered it the lowest marks available, which is not at all suspiciously almost three times higher than its perfect 10/10 tallies. It speaks volumes about how inane it is for people to take time out of their day for the sole purpose of trashing something a great deal of them probably haven’t even seen when the company itself has decided to simply put a stop to it.
Rotten Tomatoes did something similar when it actively hid the user ratings for Peter Pan & Wendy once they dipped to a transparently manufactured 11 percent, so we’ll see if IMDb does the same thing and eventually allows The Little Mermaid‘s “official” rating to reflect the hard work the trolls have been putting in.
