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Review bombing of movies certainly isn't a new phenomenon, but the racist/anti-woke negative reviews for Disney's live-action version of The Little Mermaid were apparently so egregious IMDb finally decided to implement a new rating system to compensate.
At the top of the reviews page for the film, a message appears which reads:
"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."
IMDb
The site shows the movie was rated by nearly 54,000 people, 22,000 of which gave the film a 1-star rating.
This would give the movie an unweighted score of 4.6, but IMDb's decision to use a weighted mean score makes the score 7.0.
"not all votes have the same impact (or ‘weight’) on the final rating. When unusual voting activity is detected, an alternate weighting calculation may be applied in order to preserve the reliability of our system."
"To ensure that our rating mechanism remains effective, we do not disclose the exact method used to generate the rating."
There have been people upset about Halle Bailey, a Black actor, being cast as the fictional mermaid Ariel since the announcement of her casting all the way back in 2019.
There has been a lot of online outrage against the supposedly woke casting and outright racist vitriol aimed at Bailey during that time, so it is unsurprising that the film is being review bombed now that it has been released.
People were absolutely not shocked by this turn of events.
IMDb isn't the only company to attempt to mitigate the effects of review bombing. Amazon decided to implement a 72-hour delay for user reviews on its seriesThe Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power last year after it noticed a huge discrepancy between critic scores and scores from viewers.
The Rings of Power also faced significant racist backlash online over the decision to cast actors of color to play characters of multiple fantasy races in the series, so there is a distinct theme to the series and movies that get review bombed.
IMDb has not yet commented on its decision to weight the ratings for The Little Mermaid as of time of writing.