Amazon’s ultra-pricey Lord of the Rings show appears to be the latest target of review bombers.
As discovered by The Hollywood Reporter, Amazon has halted reviews for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, an “unusual step” that was taken in order to prevent trolling. Reviews are being held for 72 hours to help weed out trolls and ensure that each review is legitimate, according to an Amazon source, who claimed that Prime Video actually started the policy this summer on all its shows.
Here’s a definition and some examples of what are clear instances of review bombing, according to The Hollywood Reporter:
“Review bombing” is when a group of online users post numerous negative reviews for a product or service due to its perceived cultural or political issues rather than its actual quality. Perusing Rotten Tomatoes’ audience reviews for Rings of Power, there are some one-star entries that meet the definition. “They wanted to involve such an important work with current politics and they have succeeded,” reads an example. “Nobody has a problem with seeing people of color in movies, series or stories … but this story was already written and should not have been sullied.” Opined another: “Reflecting world diversity in Middle Earth is an odd goal, albeit good for marketing maybe, but it was clearly more important then [sic] making a functional TV series.”
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has an 84% average Tomatometer score but 34% average audience score on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of this posting.
Amazon also owns IMDb, but while the score for the show isn’t that great on the popular database site either (6.2 stars at the time of this posting), audience ratings haven’t been suspended there.
One thing that everyone does seem to agree on is that The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is a beautiful show. One reviewer called its world “stunningly beautiful,” although they went on to say that they were “bored out of my mind.”
Source: The Hollywood Reporter