They’re just so desperate

The small brained, big bigoted people on this subreddit are convinced that Rotten Tomatoes is lying to you. It's not that most people liked The Odyssey, actually a ton of people hated it! It's woke! People hate it!

Their evidence isn't on the page. No, that would be too easy. You need to exercise that hacker skill of viewing page source. Then look at the raw JSON data for the audience score, and that's where you see the data THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO SEE. See, Rotten Tomatoes has verified and unverified reviews. Basically, if you bought a ticket on Fandango (who owns Rotten Tomatoes), you can review the movie in Fandango after you see it and that review contributes to the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. These reviews are labeled as "verified" since Fandango knows you bought a ticket to the movie. Meanwhile, anyone with a Rotten Tomatoes account can leave a review, whether they've seen the movie or not.

Look, I've got my beef with the audience score, but the reason they've done this is to prevent review bombing.

Getting back to the original Reddit post, they found that the verified reviews (aka people who definitely bought tickets and probably saw it) had a 97% score, but if you look only at the unverified reviews, it's actually lower (60%) at the time of writing this post. See!?

But let me break this down:

This number relies on you agreeing that you only care about 12% of all the reviews (throwing out 10,700 of the 12,200 reviews). In fact, the only reviews you don't trust are people who definitely actually watched it. Even if you count all the unverified reviews equally, the overall score is 92%, which is still pretty great. I'm not saying that every single unverified review is some bigot grinding an axe, but I am saying you need to do some real mental gymnastics to make this work.

Another notable thing in the data is how many people left a rating vs how many also wrote a review. Of the verified reviews, 13% of people also wrote a full review. Meanwhile, 70% of unverified users wrote a review. That's a pretty stark difference, and I'm just saying most people don't leave reviews generally (even a movie fanatic site like Letterboxd has about a 50% written review rate for this film), so a 70% written review rate is insanely high. Almost like it's likely people who came to the site to review bomb something…

Anyway, the movie made a quarter billion dollars in its opening weekend, people generally seem to love it, and I would sure love to stop thinking about people who find reason after reason to be made about people of color in media.