Star Wars: The Last Jedi and How The Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score is Basically Useless

The 8th installment in the franchise is one of the most divisive movies of all time, partly fueled by a misunderstanding of audience review aggregators which have been used to fuel divisive discourse.

Official Promotional Image From Disney+

For five years, the internet has been unable to agree about this film. An assumed majority has declared the film to be a complete cinematic failure, while others have found it to be one of their favorite films in the franchise. You’ll note the word “assumed” in the last sentence.

The Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes is an Example of Sample Bias

Is the film really that hated? After all, it currently holds a 42% audience score on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes with over 100,000 reviews. The only problem is that this creates a glaring sample bias.

If you look at those reviews, you will find that anything above one star and anything below four stars is rare compared to the rest. The sample bias is a result of an aggregator that incites reviewers to go to Rotten Tomatoes instead of the other way around, which is the case for its critic reviews.

This is more specifically called a self-selection bias where the data is unreliable and only features the individuals who want to make an account on Rotten Tomatoes and share their opinion, which is more likely to fall into an extreme because of this.

If you still don’t believe me that these kinds of audience scores are extremely inaccurate, let’s look at IMDB which is completely user-based. This data shows that the most common rating for the film is seven-out-of-ten and eight-out-of-ten. There’s an immediate inconsistency in data through the exact same means, not to mention a bigger sampling pool of 600,000 users.

But what about aggregators that go to moviegoers themselves?

Let’s take a look at Cinemascore.

“A movie’s overall CinemaScore can range from A+ to F. Each opening weekend, CinemaScore polls moviegoers directly at theatres across North America, including Canada. Pollsters provide audience members a ballot with six questions—including an A to F grade scale, purchase and rental interest and demographic data. To answer these questions, moviegoers bend back tabs on the CinemaScore ballot (instead of having to use a pen or pencil to fill out a questionnaire or survey). After the movie ends, audience members return their ballots to CinemaScore’s pollsters, who tabulate the data and send the results immediately to CinemaScore.”

Star Wars: The Last Jedi received an A Cinemascore with 89% positive feedback and a five-out-of-five score. The very first audience review on Rotten Tomatoes, written by user Jo H (who gave it half a star, by the way) had this to say about who likes the film:

“Not one genuine Star Wars fan likes this film and if they do its [sic] because they jumped on the Disney bandwagon when the series got a reboot.”

I have undoubtedly proven that this is not the case. Cinemascore polls people in the first days of a film’s release, meaning that they predominantly polled Star Wars fans as their samples. Sure, Cinemascore probably isn’t perfect either, but it seems to debunk the myth that “the fans” hated this movie.

But Why Does This Matter?

Screenshot Via Flickering Myth

I could have done an entire Second Chances: Star Wars The Last Jedi and analyzed every single thread of criticism (which I still might do), which would take three or four parts just to break down everything everyone’s said about the film. However, I thought it was more useful to deviate and address this trend for film criticism to devolve into justification or appeals to ethos.

These are modes of persuasion and division, not criticism.

I guess you could say that this is a review of discourse. Isolating the abstract notion of “the fans” is another way of claiming that you yourself represent a purist group (that must also somehow be the majority) that understands a property better than anyone else and essentially creates a confident but artificial voice of authority. One that, as evident in this case, does not actually represent the majority.

Often, this seems to convince the “reviewer” that their viewers or readers are on their side, so it’s all about creating an echo chamber of regurgitated arguments and childish diction.

This is the first video that comes up on YouTube when searching The Last Jedi. It is by the channel Vito and in the first twenty seconds, he refers to Rian Johnson and J.J. Abrams as a “gang of idiot children” if that clues you into the content throughout the video.

This video is not interested in breaking all the qualities of the film down. It is only interested in validating its own opinions through ignoring anything but negative elements and doing everything in its power to not use any other critical lenses or try and understand any other opinions.

This obsession with majority and “the fans” leads directly to this mode of criticism which completely lacks self-awareness and has no interest being in conversation with other views.

“There's not much in a critic showing off how clever he is at writing silly, supercilious gags about something he hates.” — Stanley Kubrick