The Little Mermaid's 'review bombing' is just a sign of what's to come

The Little Mermaid, Disney's latest live action remake of a cartoon classic, has been out for a week and is raising a question for all of us — and no, it's not how much Awkwafina rap it takes to go deaf. 

Instead, it's one more often seen in biology. As animals have the ability to send each other all sorts of messages — brightly coloured frogs warning predators of their toxicity, loud bird calls to let a predator know they've been spotted — there's the obvious question: what motivates any of them to tell each other the truth? 

In evolutionary science, the argument goes, "honest" signals survive because if everyone lies, no one trusts, which means both a lot more predators are killed by eating poisonous frogs, and a lot more frogs end up getting eaten. 

Now, a supposed "review bombing" campaign against The Little Mermaid's is challenging that in the world of entertainment, or perhaps showing that the way we judge, interpret and understand media is about to change

The bombs, in this case, are one-star reviews posted to aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, which draw not just from published reviews from critics but crowd-sourced input.

It's not clear they're from people who have even seen the movie, but rather, people trying to make a point — the same racist point that has followed Disney's live-action remake of The Little Mermaid since it was announced that Halle Bailey, who is Black, would play Ariel. 

Despite making an impressive $250 million in international box office, an honest accounting of audience reception seemed to be elusive. Because even as Rotten Tomatoes showed a 95 per cent audience score and IMDb a 7/10 rating, the latter tagged that number with a warning. 

"Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title," the page reads. "To preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied."

Though IMDb did not respond to a request for comment as to how their scores were adjusted, the site lists its unweighted mean average of 4.6 out of 10, with 22,000 one-star votes — accounting for more than 40 per cent of all responses.

For Rotten Tomatoes, its 95 per cent fresh rating is from its "verified audience" — those who were able to prove they had actually bought a ticket to the movie. When checking for all audience responses, that number drops down to 56 per cent. Metacritic, which seemingly didn't further tinker with its averages, shows a 2.1 out of 10 audience score. 

As to why review aggregators would be against including negative reviews at all, it speaks to the reason these sites exist— and what distinguishes honest negative reviews, part of what these crowd-sourced sites are designed to capture, from review bombings. 

"It is generally something that people do, not because they want to meaningfully engage or critique media, but because they feel that there is some ideological or cultural message that's being forced upon them," explained Claire Whitley, a PhD candidate in Screen and Media at Flinders University who has written about the trend of review bombing. 

"Bad reviewing is something that's always going to happen and should happen … but review bombing is generally ideologically driven, and it's generally, although not always, coordinated by large groups online."

When it comes to The Little Mermaid, Whitley said, that's evident for a number of reasons. Compare its reviews to past similar productions and the difference jumps out: The Lion King and Aladdin were, like The Little Mermaid, criticized for being shallow remakes of the original, but had verified audience scores within ten per cent of "all audience." And even with the lukewarm reception — including from this reviewer — the skew between extremely high and extremely low ratings "are nowhere near as stark as they are for The Little Mermaid."