Despite its critical success and its massive opening weekend haul, Star Wars: The Last Jedi has been suffering from low audience ratings. While some would chalk it off to the film being a divisive Star Wars sequel trilogy installment, there are some sites wondering whether the low user score of The Force Awakens' sequel has been artificially influenced by individuals looking to bring the film down.
First pointed out by Screen Rant,The Last Jedi's audience rating could also be the result of "review bombing," a social media activity in which certain individuals go out of their way using specific tactics to bring down films or series which they find displeasing. Film review aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes can be manipulated by the behavior of largely anonymous "Users" and it's possible for individuals to use "burner accounts," bots, and other means to influence the audience score of any film.
There are a number of threads online in which netizens are trying to tear down The Last Jedi, asking others to "hit back at Disney." This certain user on 4chan has started out a petition to tear Disney apart, asking netizens to start "calling the current trilogy as ‘the Disney fan fiction'," saying that casting of the sequel trilogy characters was "done so according to Real World Interests" and by doing a number of other things to attack The Last Jedi.
Pages on Facebook have also claimed that they've had a hand in lowering The Last Jedi's audience rating drop as well.
While it might seem a little bit too conspiratorial to believe in, the possibility of individuals manipulating scores on social media sites seems like an interesting point of discussion. The internet is a powerful tool, and it's not that difficult to wonder whether net-savvy individuals have found a way to weaponize User Score algorithms. How about you? What are your thoughts regarding The Last Jedi's low audience scores? What are your thoughts on the film?
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below.
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