Unfortunately, “review bombing,” in which a group of users flood the audience review sections with negative feedback to manipulate the perception of their target, has become a common problem. The latest target of this trend is Amazon Prime’s original Lord of the Rings prequel series, The Rings of Power, which suffered such an onslaught of bad reviews that it turned off user comments this week.
This isn’t the first time that sites like Rotten Tomatoes have been swarmed with dissenters. It happened in 2019 with Captain Marvel. Three weeks before the film’s premiere, the site was inundated with “audience” reviews that ripped the movie to shreds. Of course, it’s hard to give an honest opinion about anything without actually having seen it. That left an unfortunate asterisk next to Captain Marvel’s audience Rotten rating of 45 percent.
The tactic is becoming more frequent, and the disturbing trend is clearly focused on high-profile, female-led streaming shows or shows that cast actors of color. Forbes questioned the largely negative IMDB fan ratings for Ms. Marvel. Now on its third episode, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is reportedly the subject of another review carpet bomb. On the day of its Aug. 18 premiere, users immediately hopped on Rotten Tomatoes with a slew of one-star reviews. It’s given the show a lackluster audience score of 50 percent while critics labeled it Fresh with 87 percent. Forbes has since declared it officially review bombed, so the proverbial baby, in this case those legitimate reviews, has been tossed out with the bathwater.
This week, it happened once again with Amazon’s Rings of Power.
The first two episodes were dropped on Thursday, and already the bombers have swamped Rotten Tomatoes with negative reviews. At the time of writing, ROP has a solid Fresh critical rating of 84 percent while the audience rating is Rotten with only 37 percent positive reviews. Such a disparate take between the critics and audiences is worthy of a closer look, and many believe the show is the latest victim of the infamous review bomb tactic.
On just its first day on the streaming platform, ROP netted a whopping 25 million viewers—clearly, the public is invested. It’s received widespread praise from around the world, including The Sandman creator and author-extraordinaire Neil Gaiman, who tweeted:
Fans across social media have praised the show as well, leaving many to question the bombardment of negativity. In response, Amazon has suspended the show’s user ratings and all reviews reportedly are being held for 72 hours “to help weed out trolls and to ensure each review is legitimate,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
What do these allegations of review bombing mean for Rings of Power’s future? It won’t stop a second season from getting underway, that’s for sure. Amazon greenlit the next installment of the ultra-expensive series three years ago. Showrunners D. Payne and Patrick McKay told RadioTimes they were only “a couple weeks away from starting production.”
With Amazon taking steps to quell review bombing and a second season of ROP only weeks from getting started, it would seem the corporation will be looking more at viewership and subscription data rather than audience ratings. That being said, perhaps the real question isn’t how negative “audience” feedback will affect the next season of Rings of Power. Instead, maybe we should be asking, how will continued review bombing shape the future of Rotten Tomatoes and other review sites?
