On Tuesday I spoke at length with Rotten Tomatoes spokesperson Dana Benson regarding the movie ratings site’s Audience Score of 55% for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I was curious to know whether there was any merit to conspiracy theories that have circulated in recent days alleging organized vote campaigns to drive down the film’s scores from their “proper” levels, and why there is such a big disparity between the mediocre Rotten Tomatoes audience ratings and other, higher critics’ and viewers’ responses, such as the “A” rating from Cinemascore.
Benson, who is the Vice President of Communications at Fandango, the parent company of Rotten Tomatoes, told me that Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes are fully confident in the ratings and scores for the Star Wars picture. She assured me that Rotten Tomatoes has gone to great lengths to verify their ratings’ accuracy and authenticity.
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“We have several teams of security, network, and social database experts who constantly monitor reviews and ratings to ensure that they are genuine,” Benson said. “They haven’t seen anything unusual with The Last Jedi, except that there has been an uptick in the number of written user reviews submitted. Aside from that, everything is normal and we don’t see any unusual activity. We looked at The Last Jedi compared to other blockbusters and it has been consistent with those past films.”
For such a rare event picture like Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the increased level of interest and participation in review sites is to be expected. Benson told me that the picture has received a “comparable number of reviews to The Force Awakens.”
Some critics and social media commenters have questioned the gap between the Rotten Tomatoes score and the ratings on other services, highlighting it as proof that there is something amiss with the Rotten Tomatoes numbers. Though Quartz and other outlets have explored how the score may be rigged, the simpler and far more credible explanation is simply that a lot of people don’t like the movie.
One widely circulated story about an anonymous individual who runs the Facebook page “Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys” claims that this person created bots to manipulate the Rotten Tomatoes score. But Benson and other company reps I spoke to dismissed such claims as nonsense. Although anyone can post whatever they want on the site in the effort to drive ratings either up or down, Rotten Tomatoes has nearly two decades experience at identifying and controlling for such efforts to push the scores in one direction or another.
I pressed Ms. Benson for her hypothesis, but she chose not to offer a theory as to why the gap between Rotten Tomatoes’ critics’ reviews and those of fans now stands at 38 percentage points, 93% to 55%.
“I can’t explain why there’s such a disparity,” Benson told me. “How we take this is that people are super passionate about this movie. On the positive side, our site is popular, and it has become an important platform for debate and discussion.”
Benson noted that Rotten Tomatoes isn’t the only social media platform with such mixed reactions to The Last Jedi, and added, “We’ve been working around the clock to ensure the numbers are right. Authenticity is very important to us. We have security teams, network teams, database teams who work so hard, it’s a little disheartening for them to see people make such [accusatory] claims without knowing the facts.
However fans may feel about The Last Jedi, it’s clear that audience rating hasn’t had a discernible impact at the box office, at least not yet. The Rian Johnson-directed film enjoyed the second biggest movie debut ever in North America, with a $220 million total through Sunday, and it collected another $231 million overseas.
Read More: The Resistance Rises: ‘Last Jedi’ Overtakes ‘Attack Of The Clones’ As Most Disdained Star Wars Pic
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