These reviews really don’t add up. The Little Mermaid (2023 version…obviously) has hit theaters and the reviews for the movie are some of the strangest I’ve ever seen for a movie, and that’s putting it mildly.
I’m honestly starting to think Disney has review botted some of these aggregate sites.
The Little Mermaid has unleashed to a wide array of praise and criticism, which are probably justified and unjustified in their own ways, as the live-action sequel has taken a lot of liberties from the 1989 original, yet the most baffling thing to me about this movie is the completely wacky fan reviews. And they are really strange.
First off, let me just get out the fact that I’ve not seen this movie, I don’t plan on watching this movie, and the only exposure I have to these films are the trailers and the early released songs posted to social media. And, needless to say, that’s more than enough content and exposure for me to make an informed decision to not see this film.
So, I’m not going to be giving a review or even a score of my own as that would be disingenuous, but I will be going over the audience and critics scores of this film as they are some of the wackiest and wide-ranging reviews I’ve ever seen.
I knew this film was going to be divisive as Disney is addicted to Controversy Attention/Views (and especially those revolving around ethnicity and source material differences), but I didn’t expect the critics to turn against Disney on this film.
Now, similarly to Indiana Jones 5, there’s still the blatantly brown-nose, cookie-cutter, corporate kiss up reviews that make this movie out to be the next Citizens Kane, such as the 9.1/10 review from Entertainment, a 10/10 from The Arizona Republic, and a 9/10 from Variety, but there’s a lot more 6/10s, 5/10s, and even some scores lower than 5/10 from well known, bootlicker publications.
USA Today (6.3/10) Empire (6/10), Vanity Fair (5/10), The New York Post (5/10), The Los Angeles Times (5/10), The San Francisco Chronicle (5/10), The Hollywood Reporter (5/10), The Wall Street Journal (5/10), The Independent (5/10), The Guardian (5/10), The New York Times (3/10), and Vulture (3/10) all gave this film a 6.5/10 or lower, while outlets like The Boston Globe (7.5/10), CNN (7.5/10), Screen Rant (7/10), Collider (7.5/10), ABC (7/10), The New Yorker (7/10), and The Washington Post (7/10) could only give it a 7 or 7.5/10.
(Disney-The Little Mermaid-Official Trailer)
Now a 6/10, 7/10, and a 7.5/10 movie isn’t a bad film by any stretch of the imagination, but a film like this getting these rather average reviews from outlets and publications who would sell their own mothers to get the sweet benefits of early review access, screenings at film festivals, behind the scenes access, and cast/crew interviews from Disney is very strange but welcome.
And, as for the fan reviews, they are mostly ubiquitous across the board: they hate this film.
Metacritic currently has this film at a 5.7/10 from all critics and a dreadful 2.9/10 from fans, IMDb has this film at a 4.6/10 from fans with an unweighted score and over 9.5k 1/10 scores (that’s app. 42% of all votes), IMDb also has an unweighted fan score of 5.6 from US audiences and a 5.1/10 score from UK audiences, Rotten Tomatoes currently has this film at 67% from critics, and Google Reviews currently has an approval rating of just 5/10 from fans.
“That doesn’t seem so weird,” you’re probably thinking right now. “Critics always tend to overrate these corporate, hacky films, while the regular audiences clearly disdain this film. What’s the issue?”
Well, my most loyal reader, the issue with these reviews are that they are mixed with some of the most ungodly scores I’ve ever seen on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb. Currently on IMDb, this movie has a 7/10 weighted average out of 23k or so reviews, though over 60% (60.3% to be exact) of the reviews on the site are under 7/10.
Meanwhile, over on Rotten Tomatoes, this film currently has a whopping 95% audience score with over 2.5k reviews!
Don’t these numbers seem just a little bit strange to you too?
First off, how does a weighted review system possibly give this film a 7/10 average despite the vast majority of reviews scoring lower than 7/10 and over 40% of them scoring a measly 1/10? That just doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe it’s just an internal error, but it’s still weird for such a disparity to exist between the weighted mean and the actual mean.
And, as for the Rotten Tomatoes score, not only does this film getting a 95% score completely buck the trend of every single review system on the internet, but A LOT of them are very generic, 2-sentence gushing reviews about everything but the actual plot.
(Disney-The Little Mermaid-Official Trailer)
Perhaps it’s because live action remakes of 30-year-old movies are dumb and everyone already knows the plot, but each review is either gushing of praise to the cast and crew, a small inspirational message for girls and young kids (but mainly girls) to never give up on their dreams, etc., a basic “I loved the movie” or “The movie is amazing”, and/or these reviewers practically begging people to go out and see this movie in the theaters.
I’m not saying that these reviews, which are mostly under the “Verified Audience” tab are fake, but I’m also saying that they definitely don’t sound real.
I mean, it these reviews look especially like bots when you look at the “All Audience” tab and see decent length reviews, both praise and criticism, reviews in different languages, and reviews that just sound like actual people writing them.
If you love, hate, like, dislike, or feel completely neutral about this movie, that’s great. But don’t be surprised when fifty Disney review bots suffocate your own reviews when you go to post them on sites like Rotten Tomatoes.
Images Source: Featured Image: (Disney) (The Little Mermaid | Official Trailer – YouTube)
In Text Image 1: (Disney) (The Little Mermaid | Official Trailer – YouTube)
In Text Image 2: (Disney) (The Little Mermaid | Official Trailer – YouTube)
