How often do you look at reviews before watching a movie? If it gets a thumbs down, do you still watch it? And, if reviews matter to you, what if you found out the genuine, viewer-generated opinions are being altered? This is what the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is being accused of: rigging The Little Mermaid to give it a more positive evaluation. But never fear, movie goers, there is also a new conservative site that doesn’t cater to the woke agenda of rating movies based on diversity and inclusion.
Rigging Disney’s Little Mermaid
The Little Mermaid was criticized from the beginning for the apparently political decision to recast the previously white Ariel as a woman of color, as Liberty Nation reported. “This doesn’t seem to be about the actress, so much as the blatant political decision behind the casting,” LN wrote. Released in May, the film had a 95% verified audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, Deadline Insider detailed. However, the ratings of filmgoers were much lower. Something fishy is happening under the sea.
In fact, The Little Mermaid received so many negative reviews on IMDb that the site took action to change the way voting was calculated. On its website, this message appeared: “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title. To preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied.” American Greatness opined: “So, because the audience doesn’t like the film at such a high rate, the website has decided that it should alter the actual review numbers to make it look like the people like the movie, after all.”
In Korea, SBS News reported that the film had been subject to “ratings terrorism” according to Deadline. The article title was translated by the Korean entertainment website Zapzee to mean “Backlash Against ‘Black Mermaid’: Appearance Ridiculed, Ratings Drop on Day One.” On the day of release, the film only scored a 1.96 in that country. And in China, Maoyan Entertainment did not have a single audience score.
Did the movie really tank that badly with viewers, or were the numbers skewed to put Disney in a positive light? Or is it all about the money? American Greatness suggested that “if a website’s users tank a Disney film, Disney might decide to drop sponsorships or usage of that site because they’re bothered by it.”
The Wokeness of It All
Another possible theory, other than perhaps simply that the movie really did not appeal to moviegoers, is that audiences are sick and tired of the woke agenda. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has rules now that require a greater diversity in movies in order to be eligible for best picture at the Oscars. Academy Award-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss says the new regulations “make me vomit.” During an episode of PBS’s Firing Line, the actor said: “No one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is.” He added, “You can’t legislate that. You have to let life be life and I’m sorry. I don’t think there is a minority or majority in the country that has to be catered to like that.”
And then there’s James Carrick, a film enthusiast who launched the review site Worth it or Woke. His tags tell whether, in his opinion, movies and role models are woke, wok-ish, non-woke, or worth it. By the way, he gave The Little Mermaid the rating of “woke” with two stars and the movie What is a Woman? five stars and the “worth it” tag. His remarks on The Little Mermaid read:
“From the creative vacuum that is modern Disney, the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid sacrifices all of the charm and fun of the original in the name of personal politics and photo-realistic fish.”
(Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Disney)
The critic didn’t have a high opinion of Disney’s Peter Pan & Wendy, either: “Remember the magic and excitement of Disney’s 1953 classic, Peter Pan? Well, forget it because feminism is about to take a big runny dump on it.” This new version of the movie features black actress Yara Shahidi as Tinker Bill and some of the Lost Boys are girls.
“The disparity between critic and audience scores, as well as relentless accusations of bias by conservative readers, highlights the flaws in the [Rotten Tomatoes] system,” Carrick told Rolling Stone. “Mirroring the ‘wokeism’ that increasingly permeates the work of film-makers, many critics artificially reward activism over quality.”
Dreyfuss was asked about blackface and how that could be insensitive because of the nation’s history with slavery. His response?
“Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a Black man? Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish, they shouldn’t play The Merchant of Venice?
“Are we crazy? Do we not know that art is art? This is so patronizing. It’s so, it’s so thoughtless, and treating people like children.”
