UPDATE: Call it a glitch in the system. The score has magically gone back to 99 percent.
My apologies to those who emailed me the past few weeks over my reluctance to tackle the GLOWING 99% audience score “The Woman King” garnered on Rotten Tomatoes.
A peculiar oddity occured this morning. The above screenshot I gathered lays down the fact that ‘Woman King’ went from a pristine 99% RT audience score to an 83% overnight. This is mathematically impossible.
An article that kept being sent to me was an Evie Magazine piece, from about a month ago, titled, “There's Speculation That "The Woman King" Audience Score And Reviews On Rotten Tomatoes Are Manufactured.” The gist of Gina Florio’s write-up has her skepticism ratched up a notch over the fact that 99% of audiences loved the film, which is a pretty high number. To give a point of reference, Florio points out that “Black Panther” had a 79% audience score and that it seems pretty unlikely that “The Woman King” would rake in a 99% approval. In fact, you can count on one hand the number of films in RT’s nearly two-decade history that have racked up an audience score that high.
The narrative then turned to “chatter” on social media that the reviews were being doctored in order to shove into people’s throats the universal love that ‘Woman King’ is getting and that the main problem was that almost every review blurb entered for the film on RT is short, just a few words, posted soon after one another, and that they barely talk much about the content of the movie.
Basically, the assumption here is that bots are being used to raise the film’s stock. I was skeptical about this theory until I saw this morning’s severe audience rating downgrade.