New Analysis Claims Fake Reviews Inflated Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Rotten Tomatoes’ Verified Audience Score
A new analysis of Rotten Tomatoes reviews for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker suggests that the movie’s 86% audience score is being disingenuously inflated by fake, positive reviews of the film in an attempt to combat the wave of negative and mixed audience reviews the film continues to receive.
Related: Star Wars: The Rise of Starwalker Review – Sullying the Skywalker Name
Using the scraping software ScrapeStorm and the text analysis website Online Utility, YouTuber Sheila Allen scraped 6,000 reviews from verified reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes and noticed that not only had the film’s audience review score remain unchanged from the 86% it accrued after 6,231 reviews despite receiving over 63,000 additional reviews, but many of the reviews repeated generic phrases without contributing any meaningful commentary:
Following the conclusion of her analysis, Allen provided her data spreadsheets through links in the video description.
Some of the most repeated phrases in these allegedly fake reviews include:
- “way to end the saga”, appearing in 61 reviews.
- “great way to end the”, appearing in 59 reviews.
- “end to the skywalker saga”, appearing in 34 reviews.
- “a fitting end to the”, appearing in 32 reviews.
- “great ending to the saga”, appearing in 29 reviews.
Related: Fans React to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker After Exiting Theater: “Utter Bullshit”
As of writing, the film’s score remains at 86% despite an additional 13,000 verified audience ratings having been submitted to Rotten Tomatoes. Many of the recent reviews, some posted as little as five hours prior to the writing of this article, have provided similarly vague, one sentence recommendations.
Similar review aggregators do not seem to have experienced the same deluge of generically passive reviews as Rotten Tomatoes.
On IMDB, the audience reviews are lengthy and detailed, with each review sounding as if it was written by a unique user.
While Metacritic appears to have some recent reviews that appear to follow the trend of using generic terms as discovered by Allen, the audience score sits at 5.0, a rating which more accurately reflects the lackluster reception audiences have had to the film and, according to archives, has fluctuated accordingly.
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