Disney Declares Audience Film Scores Non-Canon
In a move causing shockwaves throughout the film world, Disney has officially declared all audience scores for all of its movie properties non-canon. The controversial move by the media giant comes in response to the polarizing reception its latest Star Wars film has received. The Last Jedi, the 8th installment of the space opera series that follows the Skywalker family, was immediately embraced by critics upon release on December 15.
Director Rian Johnson’s film enjoyed a high film score across all sites that aggregate critic reviews. Unfortunately, many of these same sites, including Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB also list an audience film score alongside the one reserved for critics. The disparity between the two metrics for The Last Jedi has grown every day with the Rotten Tomatoes audience score sitting at a dismal 55% while the critic score is still 90+%. Media outlets jumped on the story, creating click bait articles touting a conspiracy to “review bomb” the film. Russians, bots, gamergaters and the alt right were all accused of orchestrating a plan to suppress The Last Jedi’s audience score with dummy reviews.
Regardless of what caused the low number, Disney was understandably less than thrilled. Even fake reviews can have a real impact on word of mouth, which can cut the legs out from under a tent pole release — even the highly anticipated Episode VIII. Earlier today, Disney released the following statement:
“The manipulation of audience scores is something we take very seriously at Disney. We’re committed to protecting our customers from being taken advantage of. To that end, we have a responsibility to ensure our films are scored fairly based on reviews free of hatespeech, blatant lies and typos. So, from this day forward, we will no longer allow websites to list audience scores for any of our films. Sites that continue to list them will no longer have a working relationship with The Walt Disney Company. Until we can prove that these terrible scores are from actual terrible human beings with crap taste, we simply cannot entertain being trolled at such an unprecedented scale.”
Lucasfilm Story Group’s Pablo Hidalgo also weighed in (via interpreter):
“To be clear, droids will always be canon. But when it comes to review-bombing bots and the scores they mass produce, there really is no place for that in Star Wars. We already got a lot of heat for dropping space bombs down out of bombers in the middle of space. These bots would just invalidate all of the pre-established paid-for critic reviews, and we can’t have that. Honestly, they’re probably sub-Legends and Expanded Universe tier.”
How such drastic measures by the world’s largest entertainment company impacts film review sites remains to be seen. However, media analysts speculate Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB will likely see a drop in site traffic and ad revenue, since most visitors on average spend more time reading audience reviews than those posted by critics.
We reached out to both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB for comment on this story, but they politely declined. As always stay tuned to FakingStarWars.net for all the Star Wars news worth faking. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for even more unbelievable news from a galaxy far, far away.
-William “Willybobo” Bobo
