ST Solo’s 58% RT & 5.6 Metascore an indicator of just untrustworthy the TLJ scores there were?

Still relatively early but that’s about a 12% difference in the RT user and Metacritic scores between Solo and TLJ. Both much lower than their IMDB and Douban scores and lower than their critical scores. Of note is that the second most voted on choice on IMDB for Solo is 1/10.

Solo seems to be playing better here among fans including many fans who didn’t like TLJ for reasons that weren’t political (Many of you here).

Based on this, it’s looking more and more like politics and concerted, targeted review bombing campaigns did influence both films on these sites (the only notable sites where that film was below 5/10 ) and possibly by some of the same people.

Do only 12 out of every 100 hardcore fans enjoy Solo where they hated TLJ? Or, is that 12% of hardcore fans is too low and that more hardcore fans than that enjoy Solo but their influence is offset by the efforts of a concerted troll campaign?

Food for thought.

 

Maybe the reality is that half the fandom hated TLJ (myself included) and the reason that the movie has been so divisive with the fandom relate to things that only diehard Star Wars fans understand/would notice.

I personally didn't like TLJ, but I enjoyed Solo and thought it was a positive step back in the right direction for LFL.

I think people just need to accept that TLJ was something that appealed to the critics, but was either loved or loathed by the fandom at large.

There's no great conspiracy or anything it just is what it is.

Judging from the rumours that Solo is underperforming at the box office I just hope TLJ hasn't done too much long term damage to the fandom.

 

Quick answer: YES.

It was clear this time, since we were all following it happen in real time. The RT user score (want to see) was being hit quite hard due to a politically motivated group.

The same people who also did the same thing for TLJ, and will do so for IX, for Kenobi, for whatever Disney releases because they are not reviewing the movie, they want to get Disney to fire KK.

It goes without saying that we all know there are honest negative reviews as well.

 

Short Answer NO. In before the lock.

 

I suspect that what really happened in December was that a lot of negative white noise hit the reception of TLJ; and for some reason rather than accept the film was divisive people ran off to find proof their position was/wasn't a 'thing'. That's when they latched onto RT amd other sites in an attempt to prove one extreme position or the other: that nothing was awry, it was just bots and a few people on twitter/LFL as we know it was about to cease to exist.

Any moderate person would have understood almost immediately what was happening was neither of those extremes. However, the two camps turned RT into a campaign battleground.

It's laughable that RT, metacritic and other mechanisms the industry uses to advertise their products ever got such credence in some quarters.

 

Or maybe people were so disappointed about the movie and the endless undeserved praise that the movie was getting from critics that they decided that RT was the perfect avenue to voice their disapproval of the movie.

I know I certainly did.

Just for the record I also gave Solo 4/5 on RT

 

Of course. Anyone who understands polling knows such things are easily manipulated by a dedicated group.

 

I would say about 10,000 of the votes were probably alt-right types brigading RT. If you took those out, the score would probably be in the upper fifties or maybe even sixties. That might still seem low but you have to remember that self-selecting polls are always biased toward whoever is the most passionate. That's how it's always been with RT and similar review sites. Whether you see that as a feature or a bug is a matter of subjective opinion.

 

How about you wait for a few days before we can analyze the situation. TLJ was hovering in the fifties during the first few weeks before it plummeted below into the forties. Solo seems to have gone up from 56% to 58% and keep in mind, the hype for this movie is relatively low and there were many things going against Solo even without TLJ. Namely a highly publicized troubled production and low-key marketing. It'll take a while for people to see it, let alone post reviews for it.

Also note that Attack of the Clones got 57% approval from audience. The Phantom Menace got 59%. And Revenge of the Sith 65%.

Based on these readings as well as the Critic Score of 71%, 58% is fairly normal for a movie with a troubled production and a story not everyone was hyped for. The gap between the Critics and Audience is 13%. Not even a 20% difference, let alone 46%.

Of course, this is early. But then again, so is this thread. And really, it wouldn't help TLJ's case at all. You know there is a group of Star Wars fans who hate TLJ and are not part of the alt-right and troll agenda. There's a locked thread for it.

 

Both the professional critics and the users gave Solo a 6.4 out of 10 currently of Rotten Tomatoes. It's similar to The BFG. Both gave that a 6.8. I ran an average of many websites yesterday last night and Solo averaged about a 7 at the time. The Last Jedi received low user ratings or close to it across the internet for a SW movie, not just on a site or two.

 

TLJ received lower scores, yes, for Star Wars but of the larger sample data groups the RT audience score and Metacritic groups were easily the biggest standouts.

I applied an Olympic mean where I removed the most favorable to TLJ and the least favorable to your first data set in fact, while also omitted your conversion of the binary like/dislike out of your average entirely (since unlike the rest of your data that like/dislike was not an average out of 10) and it brought the average for TLJ above 7.0/10.

A “B” score observed so many others placed in large numbers that it feels reasonable to accept it as the best representation of the true impression and helped shine a spotlight on how out of whack the RT and metacores seemed to be. Something we are seeing again through Solo. From the moment the pansexual quote on Lando came out the “Want to see” score plummeted by over 40%. We were watching it in the Solo thread. Politics has seemingly angered and lead to a signicant amount of 1 star reviews for both TLJ and Solo and again the amount of 1 star reviews for Solo on IMDB show an effort to review bomb it.

 

Dork Side of the Force picking up on it:

https://dorksideoftheforce.com/2018/05/26/solo-star-wars-boycotters-tampering/

https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/4/16418832/pubg-firewatch-steam-review-bomb

Solo feels like it has dude interests front and center and solid hardcore cred and word of mouth so it will be interesting to see if the portion of TLJ haters who didn’t dislike TLJ over politics and do like Solo help it to recover more and give us a better idea of the size of these efforts. I think Solo could rally a bit.

 

I made this point a few months ago, but I actually think it is sad how both sides of the spectrum keep trying to politicise TLJ while a large core of the fandom who hated TLJ for genuine reasons ie Luke character/poor character development etc are ignored like we don't exist or unfairly and incorrectly labelled.

On one side we have those who cannot accept any criticism of TLJ and prefer to delude themselves by believing that anyone who says they don't like TLJ are some sort of troll or alt right fascist. Then on the other side we have those who are trying to falsely use the divisiveness over TLJ as some sort of proof that people hated the movie because they're sick of the supposed "SJW agenda" in Star Wars.

Both sides are equally as wrong as each other.

 

Did you read through the posts? It’s not as simple as an argument negating all criticism as political exclusively, or that none of it is political at all. There’s irrefutable evidence now that that a sizable contingent of the online communities on RT and Metacrific were triggered over political messagin and over representation issues that they perceived about men in general. That’s not up for debate at all. We can see their influence all over both sites. It does NOT negate the sizable criticism that isn’t at all driven by those factors at the same sites but with Solo now experiencing a relatively similar review bombing effort we are almost reaching a point where we can better separate the size of these respective groups and their influence over those sites.

In effect, by review bombing Solo they’re improving the available data that we will be able to use to better isolate from TLJ and cast aside as political/representation-motivated.

Two criticisms that would be completely irrelevant to anyone who doesn’t share those same views and likely wouldn’t be representative of the actual population. They’d be oversampled considerably through the self selection process.

And considering the impact those two sites have in dragging down the perception of TLJ in Magnar’s tables below the 7.0 out of 10.0 threshold... it calls into question the value of those two being trusted at all. Especially when so many other places are at 7.0 or above.

 

Spoiler

Wish the title of this thread didn't tell me something I might not care to know even after I get to see the film, but especially not before.

 

It’s audience-only but fair point regardless.

 

No doubt there is some element of review bombing, though I highly doubt it's anywhere as bad as some say.

Even if you on another 15% or so to the RT score it's hardly a glowing endorsement of TLJ.

The fact that ANH and ESB get 96 and 97% respectively show that TLJ isn't in the same galaxy as those two films.

Simple fact is alot of people love it and just as many hate it. You can do as much analysis as you like, I'm a data analyst by trade, so nobody enjoys crunching numbers more then me, but confirmation bias will ensure that whichever side is doing the analysis, they will get the result they want.



Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk

 

I felt TLJ was a better movie than Solo.

And I’m an OT fangirl.



ETA: I was really prepared to enjoy Solo as a fun romp, too.

 

And the top critic percentage on RT is now 59% (putting it in the officially rotten column). vs. 58% for the Audience Score. In other words, nose to nose. And the audience average score (6.4/10) is actually higher than the Top Critics average (6.1/10)

So have the top critics now (the same ones that gave 96% to TLJ) turned into site-bombing, wimmin-hating rednecks in only six months?

Really, anyone can cherry-pick stats to craft a narrative.

 

This is true but it would still be a notable change and an indicator that RT & Metacritic are the anomalies in comparison to the others who are more consistently 7.0 out of 10 or above.

Solo is made more for the hardcore fandom at the expense of the general audience. TLJ was the reverse.

Solo has a 7.2/10.0 IMDB score.
TLJ has a 7.3/10.0 IMDB score.

Solo has a 7.0 Douban score.
TLJ has a 7.2 Douban score.

Solo is currently 12% more liked by on RT users than TLJ and a grade higher on Metacritic than TLJ. Anecdotally it seems to be playing better with people who hated TLJ around here.

 

Not to me at all. Solo seems to be loved by hardcore fans, but in my normal world the consensus is very “meh.” I followed two different FB conversations about it and only one person expressed love for it. Most said wait for video, filler, high budget fanfic, etc.

 

Final BO numbers will say an awful lot and mean more to LFL than anything else.

 

That is what I find it so irritating. There are many who loved Rey in TFA but were dismayed by her character in TLJ, there are people who are just not liking how Finn is being treated, etc, and these many different and equally valid opinions, who are not rooted in misogyny or racism, are drown out by the loud voices of “muh SJW” and “KK has a feminazi agenda!” driven by online campaigners, completely and utterly distorting the narrative to their benefit.

@Ender_and_Bean
I think you should wait at least 3 months to make those score comparisons. Solo has just come out. The voting sampling is still too low.

Magnar’s lists showed the international perspective and how the backlash was not unique to the US but was also manifested in other countries with strong SW fanbases. Here in Japan there is no such thing as “alt-right” or cultural wars or “SJW” whining or any of that BS, much less the concept of review bombing, but the movie did receive significant backlash from the fandom that the media noticed and wrote articles about it. It’s rated in the lower end of SW movies (second lowest after AOTC, tied with TPM).

Also, in regards to online scores, they have different deviation patterns because people voting in different sites not only represent different samplings of the audience but they also use different metric standards of good, okay and bad. There is a study somewhere online about them which showed how Metacritic audience ratings constantly skewed more negatively compared to others, while Fadango voters scored movies too high constantly.

I think when it comes to IMDB, the 7/10 score is the “okay” baseline, and the one most common. They are also the most reflective of the general audience.

Rotten Tomatoes audience scores I think reflect more the passionate fanbase. They often show the widest variation. That said, while I agre that 47% for TLJ is likely a result of review bombing, the score was already at 58% in the first day right after a 99% of Must See, and with a 60,000+ sampling. That was before there was any time to gang up and bomb the site to further drag the score down. I think that 58% score is the closest to represent fan sentiment, as it also matched the data compiled by Synthesio.

And it was very likely those first day RT audience scores that, once announced by the media, they attracted the attention of those with an anti-SJW agenda.

What is happening to Solo is a different case in which the score is being boycotted in advance, before the movie was even released.

 

All of this is kind of why, although Lucasfilm’s efforts in diversity have been deemed by many as mixed at best and problematic and trope-heavy at worst, I still see more positives than negatives and try to see it as slow and steady progress.

And also why I caution those who hate Lucasfilm for not going further left to be reminded of the Jill Stein voters who basically also helped Trump win. When both ends of the political spectrum — far left and far right — oppose the moderately progressive choice on offer collectively I find it tends to benefit the Right end of the political spectrum more since the Right tends to be more united and has a larger platform via right wing news publications and YouTube and elected officials. Especially in this situation. It’s less likely that it Lucasfilm did replace Kennedy or directors they would do so with people even further left than those working currently. It’s less likely they’d promote someone who wants even more females and more POC in Star Wars, IMO, so those who are unhappy with it not going far enough for their tastes probably should at least keep that aspect in mind when also considering review bombing efforts for the other end of the spectrum.

The RT audience score seems to be rallying a little bit. Up to 59% now as more people realize it was made more with the fans in mind and potentially that the “SJW” freakout panic some were having over Lando after the pansexual comments broke was an overreaction to a character played almost exactly the same as when Billy Dee played him.

@La Calavera , great post. Very insightful. You’re right. This is all premature. I’ll be honest. I was bored this morning and more or less wanted to at least document some of the observations as they were happening to see what we could see from both review bombing efforts and see if we could better isolate the political/representation review bombers from the “They ruined Luke and Rey” review bombers.

I still don’t know if RT is more reflective of the passionate fan base but it does appear to MASSIVELY oversampled by men just going from the Facebook profile pics. The wives, girlfriends and kids are barely present in the reviews of these films at all.

538 did a study on this kind of thing:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/feature...he-online-reviews-of-tv-shows-aimed-at-women/

 

Can we not further this trap of equating diversity with left vs. right politics? Honestly everyone wants the same thing - well written, 3-dimensional characters. There is nothing to gained from being grateful for representation in horribly written, tropey characters that were clearly treated as afterthoughts by the writer. Tokenism and faux-feminism actually hurts the cause of being pro-diversity because it comes off as pandering and irritating.