I used to screw up my nose at controversy surrounding the review ratings for Star Wars movies – particularly the prequel and sequel trilogies. I find it odd that these two trilogies seem to continuously attract controversy no matter how much time has gone by. Even today, people still say the prequels are bad because Hayden Christensen and Jar Jar Binks (although of late, that hasn’t been the case at least in the last year or so).

The sequels seem to have just as much controversy surrounding them – everything from the writing of particular films in the trilogy or the direction and plot of the movies. And if not that, the character arcs themselves questioned by basically everyone. As an example (off the top of my head) – REY FROM NOWHERE. I won’t elaborate because if you’ve seen these films, you will know what I am referring to here.

But yesterday I came across a very interesting Quora post and normally I don’t stop to read these unless they are well, interesting. Someone asked the question:

“Why does the audience rating for The Rise of Skywalker NEVER change no matter how many people rate it?”

So I checked it out and low and behold, the rating hasn’t changed at all since the author of that Quora post checked it back in 2019.

However, further investigation confirms that 86% could actually be correct in terms of statistics. Now, I am not a mathematician or a statistician so I have no idea how the statistics ratings for RT works. But “review bombing” is an actual thing (that is people who are purposefully down-voting something just to get the rating to drop without even seeing the film or playing the video game) and that is something to consider.

Would Disney “buy” the RT rating for their film to freeze at 86%? Nah, I don’t think that is what’s happening. But in my experience reviewing films and books and many other things, it’s entirely subjective – NOBODY really cares all that much what a critic has to say UNLESS it’s somewhere “official” like RT. And further to this, studies have been conducted to prove (or disprove) that RT ratings for movies do not have ANY impact at all on box office numbers (you can read about this right here).

So basically, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet people or at least, do your own research and make your own decision. But I am basically saying this theory is just that, a theory an opinion and nothing more.

DEBUNKED (well, sort of)

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