Is 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power' getting review-bombed?
‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ premiered its first two episodes on Amazon Prime Video and just as expected, the series took viewers on an enthralling journey through Middle Earth. However, the show has been facing a lot of criticisms from the beginning and when we say beginning, we mean that when no one even saw a frame of it. But things got worse in recent days because a certain section of toxic fans believe that the show is an insult to JRR Tolkien and his works.
As soon as the episodes aired on Amazon Prime Video, fans began to express their opinions on websites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb. However, everyone soon realized that the reviews or ratings being given to ‘The Rings of Power’ are not genuine and the show is being “Review Bombed”. It is a phenomenon where a large number of people leave negative user reviews online and harm the show’s popularity. But when did it begin?
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It began a day before the release of ‘The Rings of Power’. IMDb opened the “User Reviews” column for the public and viewers started to rate the show and tell everyone how excited they are for the show. In a matter of hours, ‘The Rings of Power’ started its journey with a low rating of 3.4. A lot of users gave the show 1 or 2 stars even before seeing the show and cited a lot of reasons for their anger. Users believed that the diverse cast ruins Tolkien’s tribute to the legends of the British Isles. Meanwhile, others said that they had issues with Galadriel being a skilled warrior and a person who defies the wishes of her king.
After seeing users review-bombing the title on Amazon’s site, the studio took the decision to halt reviews to prevent trolling. Amazon has taken the decision to hold the reviews for the premiere for 72 hours in order to throw out all reviews that are not genuine.
That’s not it. The show’s audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is 35% and on Metacritic, it is 2.3. It’s pretty clear that viewers have already made up their minds that they don’t want to see the show and would want it to fail so Amazon scraps it. However, Amazon has already announced that the show will run for five seasons and cover almost all the aspects of the Second Age of Middle Earth.
This is not the first time a show has been a victim of review-bombing. Titles such as ‘Eternals’, ‘The Promise’, ‘The Suicide Squad’, ‘Captain Marvel’, ‘Turning Red’, and most recently, ‘She-Hulk’ also received a lot of one-star reviews even before their release. Brie Larson’s ‘Captain Marvel’ received 50,000+ zero and one reviews within a few hours of its release. On the other hand, almost 31% of ‘She Hulk’ reviews on IMDb gave the show a zero rating, meaning a certain section of the fandom had already made up their mind that the show was bad even when they didn’t see the final product. There’s a reason why genuine viewers have started to drift away from IMDb and other review sites because it has become they are not reliable now.
It would be great if these websites work on this and counter such bullying because it’s tiring to see good titles getting trolled by fans who don’t know and don’t care about them.
As of now, 'The Rings of Power' holds a rating of 6.1 on IMDb and 84% on Rotten Tomatoes.