Does Review Bombing Actually Hurt Movies, TV Shows And Video Games?

In this age of culture wars over various entertainment properties, fans have limited options in making their voices heard. There’s complaining on social media, but there are also the high-profile review sites and services that act as recommendation engines for content.

The New York Times recently published an article about how review bombing on a place like Goodreads harms authors by creating bad buzz, whether or not the reviewers in question have read the book. One book was accused of being “anti-black,” and that social media narrative translated into loads of one-star reviews on Goodreads which directly hurt the novel.

In the wider entertainment industry it’s a bit different, and review bombing is used with such frequency, it’s almost become easy to ignore it most of the time, with a few exceptions. And it works differently across movies, TV shows and video games.

Movies – The end-all be-all for movie reviews is Rotten Tomatoes, which takes into account purely whether a review is positive or negative, and uses that to create a “fresh” or “rotten” rating, with rotten anything below a 60%.

At one point, the issue of review bombing got so bad that Rotten Tomatoes introduced a verification system to prove you’d actually bought a ticket to see a particular film. This was instituted after so-called fans review bombed the MCU’s Captain Marvel with ferocity in response to comments lead actress Brie Larson had made about the movie press being too male-dominated. It remains the lowest fan-scored Marvel movie at a 45%, but after that, we saw fewer extremes for movies like this. And it did not prevent Captain Marvel from making $1.1 billion at the worldwide box office and spawning a sequel out in a few months.

For movies, there’s also a narrative that critics are disconnected from fans and hate big flashy blockbusters, so it’s the user scores you have to listen to. That doesn’t reflect reality. The glut of superhero movies actually showcase that in many instances, critics score these types of movies higher than fans, and least in the MCU.

But often it’s the case that critic or fan reviews just don’t matter, or at the very least, it’s unpredictable. DC’s The Suicide Squad scored a 90% with critics and an 82% from fans, but was a box office failure in part because general audiences thought it was going to be a bad sequel to a bad original with a close to identical name. No one really cared about the positive scores. Top Gun Maverick, meanwhile, with its 96% critical rating and 99% audience score, reflected the hugely positive word of mouth that had the recognizable IP and its huge star make that a rare, non-superhero box office smash. But again, sometimes all the positive fan reviews in the world do nothing. Shazam! Fury of the Gods had an 86% score from fans, but was one of the biggest superhero flops ever. There, the middling critic reviews (a 47%) were correct.

TV – Again, even with TV shows and movies on Metacritic, it’s Rotten Tomatoes that people pay attention to here, though probably less so for TV than movies. There are generally fewer TV critics than movie critics (which makes little sense in this day and age), and scores very much skew higher for shows, so much so that they’re almost always higher for critics than fans.

Review bombing is probably a larger problem with TV, given that unlike movies, there is no verification system for who has watched a show or not. Again, this comes up most often in superhero, sci-fi or fantasy series where fanboys have the most opinions. Marvel’s She-Hulk had an 80% critic score but a 32% audience score mainly based on its “goofy” tone and female-focused narrative examining misogyny in many episodes. We don’t know if it will get a second season or not yet. We can also see this on IMDB with their helpful graphics that often show lots of perfect 10s opposite 1 star reviews as warring camps try to control the narrative over something like Ms. Marvel (seen above).

Absolutely terrible reviews can help sink a series. Netflix’s Resident Evil series made it to #1 on the service, but a 26% audience score, one of Netflix’s lowest ever, certainly didn’t help the argument to renew it, and it was promptly cancelled. But here we have to debate what the definition of “review bombing” even is, given that sometimes a show is just…bad, and the reviews reflect that.

In the streaming era, reviews often simply do not matter at all, and it comes down mainly to watch time and budget, especially on places like Netflix. That can lead to some seemingly baffling decisions, like Netflix cancelling a series like Teenage Bounty Hunters with a 94% critic score and 96% audience score simply because it wasn’t watched enough. The 99% rated Tuca and Bertie was cancelled and had to be picked up by another network. If you make your way through Netflix’s most popular shows ever, almost all of them are somewhere between a 75% and 85% fan rating, with critic scores being all over the place (95% for Squid Game, 71% for Wednesday, 57% for Dahmer, all megahits). Here, all forms of reviews probably matter the least.

Video Games – Now we arrive at the place where fan-based review bombing happens the most often, but is probably the most ignored at this point. Unlike the previous two fields, the video game industry is home to warring factions in the console wars, or extremely reactive fans who respond to technical issues or general game problems with ultra-low scores.

But what happens is that this occurs so often, most people have grown content to ignore user reviews on Metacritic at this point (there are no video game reviews on Rotten Tomatoes for whatever reason). What frequently happens is some new console-exclusive release will come out, and the other side tries to sink it with poor scores without playing it (this recently happened initially with PlayStation-exclusive Final Fantasy XVI, and has happened with Xbox games too). Metacritic does not “verify” user reviews, they simply put a delay on being able to score games until they are out for a day or two, but it does little to deter the practice.

Probably more so than Rotten Tomatoes, and as much as fans would like to say otherwise, it’s the high and low scores by professional critics which make the most impact. Video game studios have been actually offered bonuses at times for 85+ Metascores, and usually anything over 90+ is a Game of the Year contender and will sell extremely well. Two of the highest scoring games in recent memory, Tears of the Kingdom and Elden Ring, set sales records for their respective studios/franchises. Two of the lowest scoring big games, Redfall and Saints Row, were sales disasters. But this has everything to do with critic reviews and almost nothing to do with any kind of review bombing.

A possible exception to this is Steam on PC, where users do have to own a game to rate it, though this mainly affects smaller games rather than large ones in terms of how that might impact sales. One interesting thing about Steam is how reviews can tell you the trajectory of a game over time. Something like Cyberpunk 2077 was thrashed at launch with poor reviews due to its buggy nature and missing features, but over time, recent reviews skewed more and more positive as fixes came in, and you can see that with Steam’s tracking of the most recent positive/negative scores.

Generally speaking, the answer is no, low fan scores or outright review-bombing rarely affects the final outcome of bigger movies, TV shows or video games. Movies succeed or fail for many different reasons. TV shows are mainly considered successes free of critic or fan scores largely based on pure watch time and budgets relative to that watch time. Video games put enormously heavy weight on critic scores while user scores are largely ignored completely, depending on the situation. It’s not exactly the Goodreads situation elsewhere in the entertainment industry.

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