Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Tools    





We've gone on holiday by mistake
Gandalf26 your trying to push your agenda about fishyness but your just coming off like you need the film to have a poor score to push whatever opinion you have of the film.
I still haven't seen it so I don't have a fully formed opinion yet, but I know the broadstrokes.


Movie Goer scores often are bogus because there is no way to check if person seen the film. You get quite often people pushing the positive agenda and negative sides. With neither even maybe seeing the movie.
Very true, and a good argument that's been made here that any online scores should be met with scrutiny.
__________________



By All means Rise of Skywalker is not perfect but really Im just saying you really cant trust critic and audience scores when it comes to Star Wars. marvel vs dc fandom is more civil and trusting over how they will go then the Star Wars fandom.



Would it be a massive scandal? how? everyone's under locktight NDA's and are journalists really gonna go after Disney, Disney owns loads of them anyway. They can just deny it, the worst that could happen is RT collapses, and so what? there will be other review sites.
If Rotten Tomatoes is so powerful and trusted that moderately tweaking even its secondary scores could be worth millions, it can't also be no big deal if it collapses.

I think there's clear evidence of high level scheming, to put on a propaganda front that the Emperor was always gonna be there (despite no mention prior), to pretend that the story was planned out (it wasn't), to deflect TLJ criticism into some kind of "they hate women, rascist trolls etc", now to rig scores in their favour, it's happened before on RT with the frozen wall of glowing reviews right around dvd release time. If they've no problem lying and hiding (KK) from their failures, sure why not outright rig the game.
I don't think deliberately and systematically falsifying audience data is in the same stratosphere as that kind of PR spin or face-saving, but I realize you think these people are evil incarnate, so I'm happy to discard motive as a factor altogether and just look at the evidence.

They've been clever and stupid, but mostly stupid.
To be clear, you're suggesting they rigged the number, but didn't think to ask the programmers to make it fluctuate at all to divert suspicion? That's the claim?

As talked about previously, are the 99% of casuals gonna look any deeper at the score?
Nope, but look at the hypothetical person we have to construct for this to even matter: they're just a casual, but not so casual that they don't check the main scores to decide whether to see it? They're exactly casual enough to want to see past the first/top score but not apply scrutiny to it?

Oh, and we need this very specific kind of person not just to exist, but there need to be hundreds of thousands of them, and all of them need to also be on the fence enough that they'd change their mind based on even a moderately lower number, in order for the stakes to be in the millions.

I find it difficult to accept that you believe all this is happening.



BTW, I did find that video you mentioned. He notes that the number's been stuck at 86% and says that's "not only statistically improbable...it's downright impossible!" Which I guess is just a random dude guessing at what he thinks is probable? Anyway, he says this, and then spends about 10 minutes talking about motives and corporate structure. Almost the entire video is spent trying to persuade people that someone might want to manipulate something, but virtually no time is spent on the actual statistics.

Finally, near the end, he throws up some screenshots. The absolute lowest number of scores he has is 6,200. Weirdly, he later says "in the first hundred reviews," but it sounds like he's saying it poetically, because he doesn't show it anywhere near that low and then he goes right back to saying "6,200" a minute later. The fact that he seems to think it looks worse as the number gets higher shows how innumerate he is, too, since the opposite is true.

Just for fun, as a short experiment, I gabbed the ratings totals and audience scores from three other films near the top of the box office yesterday: Jumani: The Next Level, Little Women, and Frozen II. All of them have gone up a few thousand votes, and all of them have the exact same audience score, still.



It also occurred to me earlier that the frequency of the updates probably changes over time, and that this probably helps explain the numbers not moving much, too: I'll bet they update it less frequently in the early going because otherwise it would jump all over the place (which would be expected when there were only a few hundred scores), but update it more frequently at a certain point because it doesn't fluctuate much after.



We've gone on holiday by mistake
If Rotten Tomatoes is so powerful and trusted that moderately tweaking even its secondary scores could be worth millions, it can't also be no big deal if it collapses.
No one's saying RT is powerful, though it may hold influence over movie goers, how much influence? who can say.


I don't think deliberately and systematically falsifying audience data is in the same stratosphere as that kind of PR spin or face-saving, but I realize you think these people are evil incarnate, so I'm happy to discard motive as a factor altogether and just look at the evidence.
Who do I think is evil incarnate? KK? Disney/Iger? No just incompetent and lacking a spine to come out and say "we ****ed up", although Iger kind of did take responsibility.


To be clear, you're suggesting they rigged the number, but didn't think to ask the programmers to make it fluctuate at all to divert suspicion? That's the claim?
To be clear, I don't know, as to prev discussion I'm in total agreement with you that the score becomes increasingly less suspicious the more votes it has, and as you agreed, if it was 86% in the early stages and never fluctuated at all that's a bit of an anomaly.

The reason I'm suspicious is the totally obvious wall of positive TLJ scores talked about previously, one bad review in 2 pages and no more new reviews being allowed at a time when it was getting 5-10 reviews per day, the vast majority bad. Like if you find catch a witness lying, they lose credibility for everything.

86% seems high for what we're seeing elsewhere.

-Metacritic 5.0 (out of 10) audience score after 4000 reviews.
-Lowest Cinescore for a Star Wars film
-IMDB - worst score for Star Wars other than Clones and Menace with 180,000 ratings.
-Reddit did a poll with around 60k, probably more likely to be casuals than other places and came out with a mean score of 6.25

Yet here's RT with 86%, and their recent dodgy track record.


Nope, but look at the hypothetical person we have to construct for this to even matter: they're just a casual, but not so casual that they don't check the main scores to decide whether to see it? They're exactly casual enough to want to see past the first/top score but not apply scrutiny to it?

Oh, and we need this very specific kind of person not just to exist, but there need to be hundreds of thousands of them, and all of them need to also be on the fence enough that they'd change their mind based on even a moderately lower number, in order for the stakes to be in the millions.

I find it difficult to accept that you believe all this is happening.
I mean back to earlier point, is there some study which can gauge how much influence user scores influence something? Whether it's games, online shopping, movies, TV?

I use them and my personal opinion is that nowadays these scores hold great sway over people departing from their money.

So yea it's perfectly feasible for hundreds of thousands or millions to stay away. If for example 100 million go to watch it at $10 per ticket and it makes a $1 billion, who's to say that bad reviews don't keep say 10% of people away and it makes $900 million. The only question is what number are influenced by other people's opinions, 50%,25%,10%,1 % less?

So sure why not have a review workshop pumping out those fake reviews to maximise the box office take. Could massively pay for itself.



We've gone on holiday by mistake
BTW, I did find that video you mentioned. He notes that the number's been stuck at 86% and says that's "not only statistically improbable...it's downright impossible!" Which I guess is just a random dude guessing at what he thinks is probable? Anyway, he says this, and then spends about 10 minutes talking about motives and corporate structure. Almost the entire video is spent trying to persuade people that someone might want to manipulate something, but virtually no time is spent on the actual statistics.

Finally, near the end, he throws up some screenshots. The absolute lowest number of scores he has is 6,200. Weirdly, he later says "in the first hundred reviews," but it sounds like he's saying it poetically, because he doesn't show it anywhere near that low and then he goes right back to saying "6,200" a minute later. The fact that he seems to think it looks worse as the number gets higher shows how innumerate he is, too, since the opposite is true.

Just for fun, as a short experiment, I gabbed the ratings totals and audience scores from three other films near the top of the box office yesterday: Jumani: The Next Level, Little Women, and Frozen II. All of them have gone up a few thousand votes, and all of them have the exact same audience score, still.
Here's a comment from the same video going into the statistics a bit deeper. Ignoring the 86% stuff for the time being the bottom part is very interesting, and YES this isn't verified yet and NO I'm not taking this as absolute truth yet.

So where Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker had a pretty low critic score I've been curious to see how audience members would score the movie.



* The first day at roughly 2,200 reviews it was at 86%. I thought oh, maybe its a movie critics got wrong.



* The second day after hearing from many people they did not enjoy it I checked again. roughly 13,400 reviews... 86%. Odd.



* The third day at roughly 40,00 reviews. Seeing many youtube videos of people saying it was possibly the worst of the nine. It was like they stuffed two movies in one. Hearing from many people that they simply didn't enjoy it. Still at 86%.





This was very suspicious so I decided to look at archive data. To look at the rating every single hour during the three days it's been released.



From 2,000 to 40,000. And checking every hour of each day... at no point does the score change from 86%.



So I decide to dig a bit deeper. I decided to do the insanity that was... manually counting every audience viewer score there was. Thanks to the incredibly power that is spreadsheets and databases I was able to do this in a reasonable time; few hours. And I can say *There are significant abnormalities*



The review of



> 5 Stars! Amazing ending to an amazing story!



shows up 2,243 times.



> 5 stars! Great effects. Fun, action filled story. JJ Abrams brought together the old and new elements. Recommended.



Shows up 3,143 times.



> 5 Stars! Excellent conclusion to the Skywalker Saga.



Shows up 2,243 times. Not joking the exact same amount as the amazing ending comment.





There is some minor variations. But it's very likely that a keyword bot was created to make reviews to this. You just don't get those kind of abnormalities otherwise.



As for the actual user score according to spreadsheets and manual entry. The movie sits at a score of....



64%



Here's a comment from the same video going into the statistics a bit deeper. Ignoring the 86% stuff for the time being the bottom part is very interesting, and YES this isn't verified yet and NO I'm not taking this as absolute truth yet.
Yeah, I saw that comment and almost mentioned it preemptively. He's confused about the distinction between reviews and scores, given that he says "40,000 reviews" and there aren't even that many now, if you combine verified and unverified. He's probably assuming they're the same thing.

I couldn't find that first phrase he listed after clicking through a few dozen pages, FWIW. Even assuming they're there, if he's scouring unverified ones (amazingly he doesn't even say which it is), that wouldn't be surprising. I know firsthand that some businesses hire marketing firms with no idea that they're using bots on their behalf. That happens all the time, though not usually at an especially large scale.



No one's saying RT is powerful, though it may hold influence over movie goers, how much influence? who can say.
I agree, we don't really know. But that means we lack the evidence to say there's a lot of money at stake.

Who do I think is evil incarnate? KK? Disney/Iger? No just incompetent and lacking a spine to come out and say "we ****ed up", although Iger kind of did take responsibility.
I'm being slightly cheeky. I just mean you seem very mad at these people, and I'm not really interested in arguing about the motives of people you strongly dislike. I think you're pretty inclined to believe most negative accusations. And that's fine. More productive to just assume they're capable of anything for the sake of argument and focus on the evidence.

To be clear, I don't know, as to prev discussion I'm in total agreement with you that the score becomes increasingly less suspicious the more votes it has, and as you agreed, if it was 86% in the early stages and never fluctuated at all that's a bit of an anomaly.
Yeah, and to this point, just in case anyone else is unconvinced, the other three films I mentioned are all "stuck" on the exact same verified audience score days later, too.

The following is not directed at you, but this is what confirmation bias looks like. If these people were genuinely skeptical they'd look at some other movies (literally just the next three at the box office) and see that the same thing was happening. They'd try to disprove their own theory to see how strong it was. But they're not doing that. They're doing the normal human thing, where they find something that fits the narrative and stop asking questions. Everybody does this to some degree, it's just more blatant and obvious here than usual.

The reason I'm suspicious is the totally obvious wall of positive TLJ scores talked about previously, one bad review in 2 pages and no more new reviews being allowed at a time when it was getting 5-10 reviews per day, the vast majority bad. Like if you find catch a witness lying, they lose credibility for everything.
I'm pretty sure that was a response to the coordinated score-bombing we've discussed previously, no? Or is there some other purported scandal I'm unaware of/ or forgetting?

86% seems high for what we're seeing elsewhere.

-Metacritic 5.0 (out of 10) audience score after 4000 reviews.
-Lowest Cinescore for a Star Wars film
-IMDB - worst score for Star Wars other than Clones and Menace with 180,000 ratings.
-Reddit did a poll with around 60k, probably more likely to be casuals than other places and came out with a mean score of 6.25

Yet here's RT with 86%, and their recent dodgy track record.
...those are all, I assume, not verified, and thus subject to online mobs and bots and the like. So I don't think it's suspect at all. Preventing people from making a cultural point with audience scores was the entire idea behind Verified Audience Scores.

I also don't know what the "dodgy track record" is, except that they actually bothered to respond to being score-bombed like that. Is this one of those things where someone makes an accusation and then later uses the existence of the accusation as evidence that something is shady?

I mean back to earlier point, is there some study which can gauge how much influence user scores influence something? Whether it's games, online shopping, movies, TV?
Not that I'm aware of. But I'm not disputing that they have some influence. But for them to matter in this context, we need to believe in way more than just "user scores/ratings have influence." We need to believe that there are hundreds of thousands of people who were going to see the film, and who would not if the secondary Audience Score on RT (not even the top score!) was moderately lower (IT: 60-ish percent instead of 80-ish). And we have to believe they were scrutinizing the numbers enough to care about that level of specificity, but not enough to be skeptical of it further. That's an incredibly narrow set of criteria that has to be accepted out of speculation, just to establish sufficient motive for rigging a number that we don't have any reason to expect should be moving, anyway.

I use them and my personal opinion is that nowadays these scores hold great sway over people departing from their money.
I don't think so. They hold a ton for me and probably a lot for people here, but one thing I felt I've learned over time is how massively different the public at large (emphasis on large, because there are so, so many more general moviegoers than even modest cinephiles) is from the people who come to represent each issue online. Angry people on Twitter make the populace seem a lot more progressive or militant than they actually are, and excitable fans make moviegoers seem a lot more fervent than they are. Most people see movies on a lark based on the franchise itself, a stray trailer, or literally just the fact that other people are talking about it at all.

Can't prove this either way, it's just something I've come to believe more and more over time.



One more data point here. Nobody talks about this because there's no way to latch a proxy culture war onto it, but significant divergences like this aren't especially rare:




Welcome to the human race...
You could, but nobody on either side would really give a sh*t.
__________________
I really just want you all angry and confused the whole time.
Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0



We've gone on holiday by mistake
@Yoda

I did dig a little deeper and find out that the score DID fluctuate early on, I saw 89%, 88% in the pre 1000s score's (I saw screenshots) and a commenter said the score dipped to 85% on Saturday, before going back up to 86%. So these Youtubers aren't doing their homework (they should it's their literal job).



Thanks for the legwork, good stuff.

I think asking about review bots if we really are seeing the same text in those is pretty reasonable, for the record. That kinda stuff happens a lot. It'd be much more scandalous if it continues to happen even in "verified" scores, though, since the whole idea is to exclude that kinda stuff, which I assume is happening more all over.



We've gone on holiday by mistake
Thanks for the legwork, good stuff.

I think asking about review bots if we really are seeing the same text in those is pretty reasonable, for the record. That kinda stuff happens a lot. It'd be much more scandalous if it continues to happen even in "verified" scores, though, since the whole idea is to exclude that kinda stuff, which I assume is happening more all over.
There's other analytical vids I've watched where they talk about repeat phrases, like "fantastic end to the saga", "great wrap up to the saga", with repeat/similar groups of names. Almost as if it's a marketing company trying to repeat the marketed phrase "saga""saga""saga", this is the conclusion of the 9, this is one linear coherent story, not a jumbled mess with borrowed long dead baddies.



Usually i make a strong opinion following metacritic for my gaming fulfilment, and most of the time metacritic is right about games being average, good or bad, i ve been following metacritic for a couple of years now and usually it s right



We've gone on holiday by mistake
LMAO

I haven't actually seen it yet so Iro can't put a rebuttal up to all the nonsense moments I'm gonna list.



We've gone on holiday by mistake
Ultimately though who is to blame for the disastrous start to Disney's Star Wars ownership?

Bob Iger/Disney - rushing the releases or putting a tight schedule in place?

Kathleen Kennedy - Woeful job at the helm, threw away 35 years of written Expanded Universe, some of it bad, some good, with nothing to replace it with other than safe copies and unwanted prequels. Bad supervision of Ep 8. Did not act to protect or understand the story. Insertion of unwanted real world politics or is that Disney?

Rian Johnston - Had the arrogance to disregard part 1 and 3 of a trilogy and the people who made them( or making them), instead just completely did whatever he wanted leading to an embarrassing revival of a clearly dead villain. Insulted fans on his social media. He was just an employee though, wasn't supervised. Who knows, he could have made a great trilogy on his own, I suspect not but we'll never know.

JJ - Good at starting things but not so good at finishing them. How responsible was JJ for the safe (New Hope) reboot?I don't think we can put too much blame on him for ep 9, I think with the departure of Trevorrow he was 3 months behind schedule in an already rushed production.

There's just a dearth of creativity at Lucasfilm, its almost as if they could use decades of writing to fall back on like Marvel, for example 50+ books and comics written over 35 years that they discarded. We seem to be seeing that a lot lately, like Game of Thrones disastrous end, without taking the time to allow stories to be written, and written well we can expect more of the same.



Welcome to the human race...
LMAO

I haven't actually seen it yet so Iro can't put a rebuttal up to all the nonsense moments I'm gonna list.
If anyone's nonsense could compel me to defend this movie, it's yours.