As ‘She-Hulk’ Season 1 Ends, Its Review-Bombing Is Unlike Anything The MCU Has Seen

She-Hulk, self-aware and fourth-wall breaking as it is, successfully predicted how much backlash the show would get, often quoting haters of the series almost verbatim within the show itself, as Jennifer navigates the tricky waters of being both a female hulk, and one that doesn’t want much to do with superhero-ing.

I have seen a lot of Marvel controversies in my time, and yet the backlash to She-Hulk is unlike anything the MCU has ever seen, mainly due to its taking on misogyny and comic book movie trolls directly, and those “slaps in the face” have caused angry fans to fight back the only way they know how, with angry internet comments and 0/10, 1 star review scores.

Every time I bring this up, everyone wants to debate the definition of review-bombing, as “maybe the show is just bad.” While “badness” is a subjective opinion (though professional critics do not agree in this case), is the show…twice as bad as literally everything the MCU has produced? I’d argue no, but that’s what audience scores are indicating.

Again, there’s been nothing like before, even with past controversial properties like Ms. Marvel and Captain Marvel, again, fighting back against accusations of being “woke” or in Captain Marvel’s case, actress Brie Larson expressing a desire for more diversity in comic press pools, which launched a never-ending war against her and Captain Marvel specifically.

The numbers don’t lie, though, She-Hulk is in a league of its own with how much hatred has been mounted against it:

On IMDB, She-Hulk has a 5/10 score, with a full 35.9% of reviews being 1 star. That’s more than even Ms. Marvel, which suffered similar, early bombing but that’s now a 6.2/10 with 19.6% of reviews being 1 star.

No other MCU series or movie has a lower score on IMDB than She-Hulk, and it’s not particularly close. IMDB helpfully breaks this down so we can see that this is 41,000 males giving it an average score of 4.9, and just 5,600 females giving it an average score of 6.8, nearly two full points higher.

The same is true over on Rotten Tomatoes. I previously ranked all MCU movies by audience score, and here were the bottom five:

• Thor: The Dark World – 75%
• Captain America: The First Avenger – 75%
• Iron Man 2 – 71%
• The Incredible Hulk – 70%
• Captain Marvel – 45%

Here, Captain Marvel is the clear outlier, and again, even with an early campaign against Ms. Marvel, that still ended up with an 80%. Lower than the 97%, MCU-best critic score Ms. Marvel has, but that’s the lowest audience score for any Disney Plus Marvel series besides She-Hulk.

She-Hulk has a…36% audience score, 44% lower than Ms. Marvel and 9% lower than Captain Marvel, the movie that was review-bombed so hard, Rotten Tomatoes had to change its policies about audience scores. But while you have to verify you’ve seen a movie to review it on the site, you don’t have to do that with a TV show.

This is…literally the definition of something being review-bombed. I know that term gets thrown around a lot, but this is a textbook case. She-Hulk actually seems to relish the fight, and the fact that they call out trolls directly on the show is one major reason this is happening at all. But I do not think it will affect the prospects of the series for a likely season 2, and if it does, well, then Marvel has larger problems on their hands if they’re going to listen to the worst corners of their fanbase.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.