As Peter Pan & Wendy has recently found out to its detriment, review-bombing is still a very real thing, one that’s destined to afflict The Little Mermaid, too. However, neither of the live-action Disney remakes can hold a candle to Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra, which has taken things to a whole new level.
A documentary laced with dramatic interludes hardly seems like the sort of project that would ignite an international incident, but the casting of a dark-skinned actress for said interludes caused an uproar in Egypt, one so large that legal action was filed in an attempt to not just have Queen Cleopatra banned from the airwaves, but the whole of Netflix.
In response, a state-backed broadcaster simply opted to stick its fingers in its ears and make its own version with a light-skinned person playing the legendary historical figure, which is some questionable optics to say the least. Based on its 13 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, the end result probably isn’t even worth watching, even if the furor did see it rocket right towards the upper echelons of the platform’s most-watched charts.
However, with over 1000 user ratings in the bag, Queen Cleopatra is also on course to go down as the aggregation site’s single worst-reviewed TV show of all-time. If you can believe it, the audience approval score is at a solitary percent. That’s one. A single digit. Marginally above zero. That’s unexpected to say the least, but it just goes to show that any sort of notoriety can swing both ways, even if a combined score of 14 out of 200 does highlight that maybe such overwhelming contentiousness isn’t really worth it in the long run.
