If you can’t beat them, join them! Or at least change the metric that measures what they say!
That is what IMDB is doing in the face of the latest woke Disney bomb. It has become a recurring theme in Hollywood, hasn’t it? Disney or some other woke studio does a tepid remake of a classic; they either re-gender or make beloved characters another race, sneak in a couple of extra characters or storylines featuring either black or gay people, and laugh all the way to the box office.
That used to be a tried and true recipe for success. Now, since regular, hard-working Americans are finally waking up to their nonsense, seemingly every Disney movie is going belly-up. Sort of like a dead fish, right?
In the case of the new, live-action Little Mermaid reboot, that is exactly what it appears to be, a dead fish.
Since the days of Siskel and Ebert are long past, there are few reliable resources for actually finding out any pertinent information before you go to the movies. Who can you trust?
We know most professional critics are stuck-up snobs that are trying to push their own beliefs and agendas. If it is a mindless, exciting popcorn flick, not that those exist anymore outside of anything Tom Cruise is in, then you can count on the vast majority of professional critics running it down.
.@IMDb has changed its film rating system for The Little Mermaid after people left poor reviews. The rating system now uses "an alternate weighting calculation" so that the film scores better. https://t.co/LQkC8qKWH9
— Andy Ngô
(@MrAndyNgo) June 1, 2023
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With the advent of the internet came IMDb, or the Internet Movie Database. It is a metric that calculates user reviews in conjunction with critic reviews. Generally speaking, if a movie gets a low critic score, it gets a high user score, and vice/versa.
Since Disney is one of the most woke, powerful companies on the planet, apparently IMBb has decided to alter their rating scale to prop up the latest woke Disney bomb, the live action reboot of The Little Mermaid.
The film currently has a 7.0/10 rating out of 43,000 votes, which by most metrics would be considered good. that is, until you look closer at the fine print. The IMDb website states:
“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.”
They don’t elaborate on what the “unusual voting activity” is, but suffice to assume they are trying to mask the fact that many, many users didn’t like the film and gave it a bad user review.
Isn’t that how it is supposed to work? Could you imagine trying to book a hotel room or purchase something on Amazon, and when you try to read the user review, it states that they changed the metric because people didn’t like the product?
IMDb when on to state:
“Although we accept and consider all votes received by users, not all votes have the same impact (or ‘weight’) on the final rating, when unusual voting activity is detected, an alternate weighting calculation may be applied in order to preserve the reliability of our system. To ensure that our rating mechanism remains effective, we do not disclose the exact method used to generate the rating.”
In other words, when IMDb gets a bunch of negative reviews for a movie a powerhouse like Disney is staking what is left of their reputation on, they may stinker-tinker with the stats.
At this point, it is hard to say what smells worse; the Little Mermaid or IMDb. Either way, it’s one more reason to watch and judge for yourself. That is unless it is a stale remake. That seems to be what Disney is into lately.