Review bomb

A review bomb is an Internet phenomenon where a user leaves positive or negative reviews with multiple accounts. Many targets are around published work, a business, a product, or a service. Review bombs can be found in review aggregating websites and digital stores.

This page is going to talk about review bombing in films. For the video game counterpart, go here.

Films are not safe from review bombing due to perceived social issues related to the cast and crew and not due to any aspect of the film itself. This extends not only to user review scores on sites like Rotten Tomatoes but to the film's promotional trailers on YouTube.

Examples

 * 1) The 2014 Indian film Gunday got review-bombed by Bangladeshis on IMDb due to a historical inaccuracy regarding the creation of Bangladesh in the film's opening narration. It was the lowest-rated film on the site.
 * 2) The 2016 version of Ghostbusters film was met with user backlash on its announcement of having an all-female starring cast (unlike previous films that had an all-male starring cast), causing to become review bombed. The film's IMDb page was also subject to a coordinated effort to lower its rating before the film's release. Some media outlets dubbed it "The Female Ghostbusters". Despite that, it somehow got 6.9/10 rating score for IMDb.
 * 3) The 2016 historical drama The Promise (a movie about the Armenian genocide) was review-bombed on IMDb prior to release. Commentators assessed that these were mostly votes by people who could not possibly have seen the film and that the one-star voting was part of an orchestrated campaign by Armenian Genocide deniers to downrate, which had then initiated an Armenian response to rate the film highly.
 * 4) The second installment of the Star Wars sequel trilogy titled The Last Jedi was flooded with negative audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes due to the film's nature.
 * 5) Captain Marvel was review bombed by trolls and fanboys on Rotten Tomatoes due to Brie Larson's activism. The "Want to See" score an audience anticipation poll had fallen to 28% ahead for the official release. Reports described the decline as an effort by some to review bomb the film's page with negative comments attacking the film and Larson for their perceived feminism. Rotten Tomatoes changed the "Want to See" feature shortly after, showing only the number of people indicating interest in the film instead of a percentage.
 * 6) The 2021 film Music was review bombed due to controversy around the casting of neurotypical actress Maddie Ziegler as an autistic girl as well as for scenes involving potentially dangerous restraints.
 * 7) The 2021 MCU film Eternals got review bombed due to its LGBT characters.
 * 8) The 2018 MCU film mh:greatestmovies:Black Panther got review bombed before the film got released due to the main character being black.
 * 9) One of the most infamous examples comes from Sadak 2, which was universally panned by many largely for nepotism reasons, and not for the quality of the movie itself. In fact, the trailer was the second-most disliked YouTube video ever made right behind YouTube Rewind 2018 before the removal of dislikes the following year.
 * 10) mh:greatestmovies:Godzilla vs. Kong was review bombed by Snyder Cut fans on IMDb because they are angry with Warner Bros. over not continuing the Snyderverse.
 * 11) The 2021 DCEU film mh:greatestmovies:The Suicide Squad got review bombed by some DC fanboys due to its "lighter" tone rather than how the DCEU makes more gritty films. Despite this, the film was an action-comedy with dark elements.
 * 12) 2021's Dune got reviewed bombed by Marvel fanboys on Letterboxd due to Denis Villeneuve having an honest opinion on Marvel films in general regardless if it was the MCU or not while claiming "we are in front of too many Marvel movies that are nothing more than a ‘cut and paste’ of others"
 * 13) Critics managed to review bomb mh:greatestmovies:Ghostbusters: Afterlife mainly because of them liking 2016's Ghostbusters
 * 14) 2022's mh:greatestmovies:The Batman has gotten review bombed on IMDb due to its nature of the film. There are reports of some SnyderVerse fanboys who also review bombed the film as well.
 * 15) The 2022 Pixar film Lightyear got review-bombed due to the film having a scene with two LGBT characters. Another potential reason was due to Chris Evans voicing Buzz instead of Tim Allen.

Why This Practice Sucks

 * 1) First off, there is often a high amount of review bombing that can lead to having legit and honest reviewers overshadowed. This causes some movies to be unfairly hated. While a lot of movies are not perfect, it's annoying to see reviewers spam bad reviews.
 * 2) The reasons why stuff like this occurs are because of attention, a controversy, changes to the franchise, or how a certain product turned out. For instance, a movie gets review bombed due to the addition of an LGBT character.
 * 3) Many of the review bombings, in general, do not qualify as a review. Review bombing instead turns out to be spam.
 * 4) A type of review bomb which is used to praise certain media wrongly, would be the reverse review bomb. Basically, those reviews suggest censoring criticism.
 * 5) Thanks to this practice, they may lead the film to be underperformed at the box office like with Lightyear which could be a reason why it was underperformed.
 * 6) Hypocrisy: One of the reasons movie buffs hate movie journalism is when critics like the ones from Rotten Tomatoes give bad/mediocre movies good reviews or vice versa such as 2016 Ghostbusters and Captain Marvel, how is this any different? Please think about it.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Though still wrong, the review bomb may do have a point about the flaws of certain movies like Music 2021, Eternals, and 2016's Ghostbusters
 * 2) Sometimes you get review sites that can have means to detect or prevent review bombing.

Videos
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