The platform adjusted the rating system and gave the film a weighted rating.
The Internet Movie Database (IMdb for short) has adjusted the rating system for the new edition of the Disney classic “The Little Mermaid”. The reason for this is extreme review bombing, i.e. the practice of giving a work a large number of negative ratings through fake accounts that are created manually or with the help of bots.
As of June 1, 2023, the film has just over 43,000 ratings, including around 17,000 with only one star, which is the lowest rating. In a side note on the Movie ratings page read that IMDb had discovered “unusual activity”. The rating is therefore “weighted by the platform to ensure a reliable evaluation.” The weighted score of the remake is 7 stars out of 10 possible, while the unweighted mean corresponds to 4.7. How exactly the website adjusts the calculations is not to be made known.
Racist criticism of “The Little Mermaid”
The review bombing is due to the racist hostility towards the leading actress Halle Bailey. Apparently, many people couldn’t handle the fact that a black actress slipped into the role of a fictional mermaid. The hashtag “NotMyAriel” even trended on Twitter when footage from the strip was first released. The criticism is based on the fact that the eponymous mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairy tale is described as having fair skin.
A similar controversy arose around the release of the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Various denizens of Middle-earth were cast with black people, which went against the grain of countless internet users. IMDb then adjusted the rating system, introducing a 72-hour review period for user reviews on each new episode.