'Boiz will be 'boiz
This is what I meant by review-bombing and, more particularly, review-boosting. I'm not sure how, or if, Rotten Tomatoes takes artificial voting into account, but IMDb makes it so obvious that it seems pointless.
The 10/10 and 1/10 spikes are clearly the work of the fanboiz and h8rz. In reality, the number of genuine 1 ratings is less than 1000, and the 10 ratings not much higher. The differences are the work of idiotic zealots trying to game the system. To prove what, exactly? Think about it: how many films have you seen that are truly so brilliant that they're 10/10, or so awful that they're 1/10? Admittedly, different people have different standards; some are incredibly high, others are incredibly low, but this is out of whack.
The fanboiz 'n' gurlz probably represent the Marvel stans, and those who'll support anything as long as mo' rep
, irrespective of the quality of the storytelling. In the other corner, h8rz are a motley assortment of Disney discontents; Marvel moaners, who reject deviations from the original comics' representations and, more broadly, phase 4's M-She-U
; people who object to same-sex relationships being portrayed on screen; and, what else have you got?
Variety's film awards editor, Clayton Davies, claimed that the hate comes, at least in part, from the director being a woman. But he's full of baloney; women have successfully helmed popular action genre films. Besides, most viewers neither know, nor really care about, the director; unless they're a huge name in the business, with a long and distinguished track record or a characteristic style—Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, errr…
It's what's on screen that matters.
All that aside, it's just a pity that the two sides have to choose ratings aggregators—which can otherwise be a helpful guide for the general viewing population—to wage their pissing contest. That's the price to be paid for an egalitarian and anonymous internet, I guess. It regresses to the lowest common denominator.
Nine months on, and things have settled down. The pissing contest's over, and everyone's moved on.
The extreme votes now represent half of the overall proportion that they did before. And their influence has been attenuated by the vast majority of newer ones—predominantly in the range 5–8/10—resulting in the more expected normal distribution
.
Still, an overall score of 6.3, while nothing to be ashamed of, is hardly something to boast about either.