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IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

575 points by danskeren 4y ago

Kiro 4y ago
People are upset not because the show is bad but because it's not as bad as they expected. In fact, it's quite good. This ruins their mockery narrative.
- simonh 4y ago
  I do worry about that. The extremely negative sentiment IMHO is vastly out of any proportion to the quality of the show. Frankly, much of the criticism was based on misunderstandings of the characters and what Tolkien actually wrote anyway. It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s nowhere near as dire as the anti-hype suggests. If it had come out without any connection to Tolkien, or the truly cringeworthy marketing, I think it would be doing fine.
- nathias 4y ago
  what, no I really wanted it to be watchable, but it isn't
- tgv 4y ago
  Really? Then again, I'm not upset, nor did I find it good. It's quite boring and bland. It focuses on a few characters instead of a large quest, but those characters are, well, empty. There's little to nothing that spells greater things to come. And they talk in this pseudo-archaic English ("What say thee of thy tidings, ye olde Master?", you get the idea), but still use words like the noun "project" in its modern sense. And the music for the first Hobbit/Harfoot scene sounds like the bloody Sims. It's a pretty mediocre 5, perhaps 6, out of 10 rating from me. Back to your statement: where did you get that people "are upset not because the show is bad but because it's not as bad as they expected"? Are there really that many people with the desperate desire to mock it? OTOH, nearly 40% rated it a 10. Where does that come from, then? I suppose that a few people with bots could also be an explanation.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    > Are there really that many people with the desperate desire to mock it? Yes, the most thumbed down trailer of all-time and a big meme culture based on how bad it was going to be, how they ruined Tolkien completely etc. Now when the show is not the 1/10 trainwreck they expected all those memes become invalidated and this infuriates the mob.
HeavyStorm 4y ago
I even have imdb installed here on my phone. Has always been my go to site for movies ratings, and I would defend that their top 50 movie lists reflected the real best movies... Why would they erode trust in their platform like this...
fonque99 4y ago
...they even use fake text length error messages to prevent you from submitting negative reviews. What I did: 1.) I wrote a review with 5 stars and tried to submit it. There was a red error message saying the text would be below 600 characters so I couldn't submit it. 2.) I copied a lengthy random text into the submission field so it was 1000 characters++ - still the same error message 3.) I switched to a 6 star rating. Suddenly the error message magically disappeared and I could submit it. 4.) I toggled back and forth between 4, 5, 6 and 7 stars. After a few tries I could submit the review with 5/10 on Sept 5th. 5.) I even got a confirmation email with a link where I can track my contribution. Text said "Thank you for your contribution - this item is awaiting processing by our data editors. Estimated processing date - 6 September 2022" 6.) You can guess yourself if my review has been processed... Like all other reviews below 6/10, it doesn't show up on the review page. 6/10 is still the lowest reviews available: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=userRating&dir=asc&ratingFilter=0 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=userRating... =>>> Try by yourselves if you experience the same stuff. We've had reports of deleted reviews, too. I guess it's clear that they're manipulating on a large scale. I wouldn't be surprised if the 6.7 overall rating is manipulated, too.
fonque99 4y ago
It's getting more and more hilarious. my 5/10 review has been blocked since Sept 5 now. In the prime app they claim an imdb rating of 7.4 whereas on the website it's only 6.7. What a joke.
ftyhbhyjnjk 4y ago
danskeren 4y ago
Not sure if IMDb has a history of deleting negative user reviews made in good faith, but worth noting that IMDb and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (TV series) are both owned by Amazon.
- nicolas_t 4y ago
  They didn't seem to delete user reviews for Lightyear made by all the bigots that were offended by having two women kissing in the movie so it seems that there's some preferential treatment for Amazon properties. And deleting negative reviews by bigots at least would be more defensible than deleting negative reviews from fans of Tolkien who take issue with the treatment of the work they love. EDIT: I still haven't seen the show yet and I originally thought the issue with review bombing was similar to people like me hating the show foundation on Apple TV... I see now that people claim that a lot of negative reviews were due to the race of characters and people claiming the "show is too woke". In that case, it's actually more of a similar situation to Lightyear. Still, it's very interesting to see the differing treatment of Lightyear, a pixar property compared to this, an Amazon show.
  - SSLy 4y ago
    what's wrong with the foundation btw?
    - nicolas_t 4y ago
      It's jarringly different from the books. Names are the same and a very few elements are similar but it's really something completely different. In Asimov's work, psychohistory is not about specific heroes or great people changing things but more about the inexorable trend leading to certain outcomes. The repeated sci-fi action scenes don't really match with the original work. That said, it's not a bad show if you watch it not having read the books. There are some decent original ideas, I liked the idea of the genetic dynasty. But, it's not Asimov's foundation, it's so different that it can hardly be said to be inspired by it. So, I wouldn't be complaining about it if it had a different name. Taking a series of well beloved books and deciding to so loosely adapt them that the end results has almost no relationship to the books feels disrespectful to me though.
trasz 4y ago
Nothing that’s controlled by a corporation can ever be trusted.
- Lacerda69 4y ago
  Nothing that’s controlled by someone else can ever be trusted [blindly and completely].
  - trasz 4y ago
    Of course, but with non-corporate entities you can take precautions; see Open Source projects. Corporations, on the other hand, have economic incentives to screw you over, and eventually always will.
fredski42 4y ago
Ah. Didn’t know IMDB was owned by Amazon. Put’s all ratings on Prime in a different perspective.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > Didn’t know IMDB was owned by Amazon Yep. That's what enables Prime Video's X-Ray where you can see details about the actors and music of a particular scene while watching, and what also makes it impossible for competitors such as Netflix to have a similar feature. If IMDB were separate, the data would probably be accessible to anyone.
  - stingraycharles 4y ago
    IMDB is the only provider of this type of data?
    - subsistence234 4y ago
    - dewey 4y ago
      No, there's a bunch of other companies doing that but they are not as consumer facing as IMDb. One would be: https://www.gracenote.com/tv-and-movie-data/ https://www.gracenote.com/tv-and-movie-data/
  - wodenokoto 4y ago
    C-more use IMDb ratings in their streaming app. So it is possible for competitors to buy access to this data. I also think that minute to minute music and actor info is not sourced from IMDb. And I’d be surprised if Netflix couldn’t at least to it for their own properties. I think there is a fundamental difference in how the two services go about things. On Netflix it can be quite the challenge to even see cast and director and it is difficult to browse by such categories. Netflix sees themselves as the purveyor of advanced recommendations.
  - hobofan 4y ago
pseudo0 4y ago
Interesting to contrast the IMDB rating with Rotten Tomatoes, not owned by Amazon, which currently has an audience rating of 38%. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_rings_of_power https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_... In my opinion, Steam does the best job of handling this tricky problem by leaving all reviews up and transparently letting the user pick whether or not to include periods of "unusual activity".
- yakubin 4y ago
  Nit: I'm seeing 36%.
  - timbit42 4y ago
    People are still submitting ratings.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    Suppose the show had been extremely faithful to the source material and hordes of Tolkien fans had reviewed it well. Would similar logic apply? That their good reviews should be deleted because they would be mostly useless to the broader audience?
  - hdcivhd6 4y ago
    - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      I have trouble making sense of your comment. I believe people would like the ratings of a show to reflect its quality and be somewhat informative. Brigading by a subpopulation with vastly different interest to the general public interferes with that and that legitimises removing their reviews as far as I’m concerned.
mountainb 4y ago
Could be construed as illegal to do this user the FTC act.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
nathanaldensr 4y ago
We are not allowed to state opinions that do not agree with our woke corporate masters, it seems. What are they so afraid of?
- ngetchell 4y ago
  What does woke have to do with anything?
  - djbebs 4y ago
    Did you not watch the episodes that are out?
    - ngetchell 4y ago
      I've now watched the episodes. Woke still has nothing to do with this. It more seems like internet trolls are complaining they see a darker skinned person on their TV and the news media is happy to run with that story.
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    The show is bombed with bad reviews because some people don’t like some aspects of the show, that they find "woke".
  - ufo 4y ago
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - BrainVirus 4y ago
      People are grumpy because Amazon gutted LotR universe, made it an empty vessel for their political ideology and now refuse to deal with well-earned criticism in an honest fashion.
Ecstatify 4y ago
Current standing on IMDB: The Rings of Power - 6.2 stars (42K ratings) House of the Dragon - 8.8 stars (75K ratings)
- indigodaddy 4y ago
  I have to believe that the HoD IMDb rating is being pumped up by a rabid fanbase, even though the show is in fact, a pile of garbage. RoP IMO is quite a lot better. I enjoyed the first episode.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    House of Dragons has an anti-fan base. The most popular subreddit for game of thrones content is based around hating the source material: https://old.reddit.com/r/freefolk/ https://old.reddit.com/r/freefolk/
  - johnfn 4y ago
    Hm. The fanbase from GoT was rabid, I'll give you, but rabid with negativity - they hated the ending, and a lot of them soured on the entire show after it was over. LoTR has an equally rapid fanbase, I'd say, but they were much more uniformly positive towards the source material. Then again, maybe that's why - the GoT fans are pleasantly surprised that HotD isn't a disaster, whereas the LoTR fans are upset that it's not as good as they'd expect.
    - indigodaddy 4y ago
      It sure seemed like a disaster 30 minutes in. I guess I’ll continue with it and see..
  - Nimitz14 4y ago
    Your opinion is an extremely rare one, if you weren't already aware. The consensus is the opposite.
somehnacct3757 4y ago
All crowd-sourced online aggregation is bogus. Every single form of it has someone placing their finger on the scale one way or the other. If it isn't a familial corporation it's for-hire bot farms, perhaps even hired by your competition. Or maybe it's the aggregator themselves, running a digital protection racket. Instead, go read a full review written by a trusted curator.
- nicbou 4y ago
  There isn't always a trusted curator. Most of the time, there isn't.
  - nvr219 4y ago
    I generally rely on my friends' recommendations because they know me (and watch a lot more TV than I do somehow)
- thrown_22 4y ago
  >Instead, go read a full review written by a trusted curator. That's the point, trusted curators have been drifting further and further from what the majority of people find good for a long time. What critics find good and what the target audience finds good are not the same: https://youtu.be/eFRWDZBH8Dc?t=745 https://youtu.be/eFRWDZBH8Dc?t=745
  - soco 4y ago
    I'm split about this. Is it good or bad? Should we only read and appreciate what the masses read and appreciate? On one hand yeah it would make sense, confirmation of the masses is a thing and not everybody can be wrong. But on the other hand everybody is different and different biases make for different preferences. When I read reviews on the web I always take time to read the negatives to see what they found as negative. Many times that's just bull (valid also about the positives btw), people having beef with whatever, but sometimes they point out interesting bits. And it takes me much less time to read such reviews (and I also learn more) than by watching the entire contents.
glogla 4y ago
I have not seen it myself, but every criticism I've read so far was complaining about "mandatory woke". Some reviews also mentioned other things they don't like, like costumes not being good or fights being cinematic instead of subdued or characters appearing where they shouldn't be if you take Silmarillion into accord ... but I have not read even one review that didn't include some version of "I hate it because it has black people in it" - whether calling it political, woke, "not true to source with regards to casting" or whatever. I am not overstating it - literally one hundred percent of reviews I have seen were about people not liking it because there are non-white people in it.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  I don’t think all critics of “mandatory woke” can be boiled down to “I hate it because it has black people in it”. I mean I wouldn’t personally use the world woke because it looks mostly devoid of meaning but as a European, the mandatory diversity in American production has reached a point where it sometimes gets very funny. I don’t really mind it because it doesn’t affect the narrative structure of what you are watching most of the time but I must confess that I did roll my eyes at black characters acting normally in the middle of a tavern in medieval Europe recently.
  - simonh 4y ago
    There were black peoples, or at least Middle Eastern, all over Medieval Europe. The Arthurian cycle has moorish knights. When Eleanor of Aquitaine married the English king, part of her dowry was a North African city. Are we to believe none of them travelled to England? Berber pirates raided Iceland for slaves so there were whites people in Africa, why not black people in Europe? Some people travelled a lot. The Saxons sent emissaries to what’s now Sri Lanka, while an Armenian Christian monk born in Beijing met the pope and Edward I. In Middle Earth the Numenorians had extensive colonies in the far south of the continent. This obsession with racial segregation is absurd and utterly ahistorical.
    - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
lloppal 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20220903103220/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=1 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903103220/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104125/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=2 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104125/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104126/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=3 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104126/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104131/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=4 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104131/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104824/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=5 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104824/https://www.imdb.... indeed all show zero results. Anything higher than a 5, does show results: https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104206/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=6 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104206/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104208/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=7 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104208/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104210/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=8 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104210/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104822/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=9 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104822/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104818/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=10 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104818/https://www.imdb.... Now, one can have lots of opinions about 0/10 reviews, but they surely have just the same right to exist as similarly extreme 10/10 reviews.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  I have to admit that I did chuckle a little at some of the 10/10 quotes ( caps preserved ): << As a REAL Tolkien fan, I couldn't have asked for any better. Anyone who complains otherwise isn't a Tolkien fan, but a Peter Jackson fan, and can't accept someone new showing their creative vision for the lore. << They STORY is ALSO EXCELLENT IF you LISTEN! (Abhorrently, that seems so infinitely difficult for some to do). TRUE, that there is a much longer than necessary scene 2/3's of the way through which almost put me to sleep (and it is the reason I am not giving this a 10) << As said above, I will not deny there is some mediocrity, but I cannot fathom why/how a massive 30% of all the ratings are 1 stars... does not seem genuine to me. << This is honestly already on par or better than game of thrones << Listen...we know it is not book accurate. Much of The Lord of The Rings and Hobbit movies (modern era non cartoon versions) weren't either. NO length of television show or movie could capture what Tolkien put on pages. So GET OVER IT. I agree they should have kept at least few 1s for pretends.
JadoJodo 4y ago
I understand that Bezos spent a TON of money on this, but the way he’s forcing it is kinda crazy. The ads for it are EVERYWHERE. I was trying to check out at Whole Foods yesterday and had to sit through a 5s ad for it when I opened the Amazon shopping app (just to get to the Prime member barcode). Deleting reviews to “guarantee” success is just sad.
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  Also on the side of Amazon delivery vans.
  - dmix 4y ago
    And the Amazon boxes you get delivered have LOTR graphics on them
    - sprkwd 4y ago
      And the loading screens in Adobe products have LotR based graphics on them as well.
    - propogandist 4y ago
      with Amazon Prime raising rates routinely, they want customers to engage with Prime Video, which is really a loss leader that's meant to keep consumers renewing Prime membership. Amazon boxes is premium real estate and it costs them nothing to advertise. Its helping drive awareness, as you recalled the ad and specifically where you saw it, which is a strong signal for advertisers that want to infiltrate your mind.
- lake_vincent 4y ago
  The whole thing reeks of Bezos wanting to be cool. You can almost hear his desperate cries for approval through the poorly written, and poorly delivered, script. Honestly, just watch the first scene. It's hilariously soulless. (This is all my opinion. Others are entitled to feel differently)
- doitLP 4y ago
Karellen 4y ago
I don't get reviews saying that TRoP, or some other new prestige TV series, is "terrible", or "a disaster", based on the first couple of episodes. Some really excellent TV series have taken more than a whole 26-episode season before they find their rhythm and get properly good. ST:TNG is a classic example, but I'm pretty sure you can come up with others. And some people are claiming that a new series totally worthless, not based on the first series, but based on the first episode? Are you kidding me? I mean, is it OK if the first episode of a series is unevenly paced, and contains too much exposition, and clunky "tell, don't show" dialogue about who the main characters are and what their deal is? No, no it isn't. We should ask that writers do better, and trust audiences to have the patience to learn who characters are through action over the course of a few episodes. But just because they don't do those things, is it really worth writing off the next 5 (or however many) seasons of a show, based on one episode? Who does that? What does anyone gain from that? OK, there's a lot of prestige serialised TV out there now, and you probably can't watch all of it even if you wanted to, so some culling is probably necessary at some stage. But does anyone really have to write something off quite so soon? You can't even give it half a season to try and get up to speed? I don't get it.
- sarchertech 4y ago
  People were saying the show was going to be terrible based on promo images.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    And they were right too
- thrown_22 4y ago
  I want to know if it is worth watching a series while it's airing. It may not be fair, but I have more important things to do with my time than give mind share to mega corp projects which are poorly executed. These aren't some small teams labours of love which I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to.
- narag 4y ago
  I agree. The first two episodes of The Rings of Power are unbearably boring. But let's wait. Anyway, IMDb ratings are getting totally unreliable to me. I wasted hours of my life that won't come back, watching some show called The Terminal List that scored a solid eight. Carnage of Asimov's Foundation is 7.4 and that... thing, The Wheel of Time 7.1. I wonder if there's a way to see evolution of rating, for me Star Trek Discovery seasons are nine, seven, two, pass... but it's holding at 7 right now.
farleykr 4y ago
My issue with the show has nothing to do with the “woke” stuff mentioned here. I don’t like it because none of the heroes are likable. All of them have some form of sticking it to the man and doing what they want as their story line. True heroes are self-sacrificial and reluctant. Contrast Galadriel who acts like a self righteous dickhead with Aragorn who was reluctant to accept his calling spent and three movies proving himself to be worthy of honor and love and then going to what he thought was certain death to give Frodo a chance to destroy the ring. The gender or race of the characters in TRoP is not the point. It’s that they’re all unlikable because they don’t love and respect others.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
  Don't you think that 2 episodes is a bit too little to judge the entire series like that? The show covers A LOT more time than LOtR did, there's plenty of space for character development. Galadriel was not exactly likeable when she participated in the first kinslaying, or when she ran away from the war of wrath.
  - throw0101c 4y ago
    > The show covers A LOT more time than LOtR did, there's plenty of space for character development. The first two episodes of TRoP are 90 minutes each, for a total run time of three hours. Three hours is about the run time of the first LoTR movie (Fellowship): how much story were they able to tell in those three hours? Further, the other epic fantasy series, House of Dragons, also has released two episodes: how much story have they been able to tell? What are the reviews of that franchise? The TRoP series may not end up sucking after the first eight episodes, but having the first two (allegedly: haven't seen it myself) suck seems to be a waste of everyone's time/effort/money.
    - isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
      I'm not saying it's of the same caliber as the trilogy, but it's definitely not garbage which deserves one star. It's already better than the hobbit, however low of a bar that is.
bowsamic 4y ago
I don't blame review sites for deleting "outrage reviews". I really don't think they say anything about the quality of the thing, just that there is some current rage going on. These are usually deleted on Steam too, in fact I think they have some kind of algorithm to detect when it is happening. I don't think such reviews should really be counted in the same category as normal reviews since they are just based on outrage rather than the actual content
nathias 4y ago
the show deserves 3/4 at best, I haven't seen anything so expensive this bad, it's really weird that this much money can't buy quality in any of the aspects of the show
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Because too much of the money goes to the intellectual property owner as rent. And also, prequel/sequel stuff that was not originally mapped out by the author is usually crap.
  - nathias 4y ago
    I don't think thats the case, its this forcing of current US politics into writing that doesn't have the skill to include it in a seamless way to be compatible with world building and storytelling. Also the CGI that's really the highest point for a lot of people seems really bad to me, everything looks so plastic ...
  - rocmcd 4y ago
    Absolutely has nothing to do with the IP owner. That much money (as well as being tied to a big name like Amazon) attracts the antithesis of creativity, where everything becomes ‘plastic’ (someone above called it a ‘wax museum’ which is a good way to put it) and means anything remotely controversial or original will be killed dead.
- seanalltogether 4y ago
  My guess is that because they threw so much money at this, they also put too many cooks in the kitchen. You're gonna end up killing all creativity if it has to get rubber-stamped by a long line of "producers".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tjpnz 4y ago
I think people with legitimate criticisms are starting to get really tired being called a racist or a misogynist. 99% of the reviews aren't about wokeness at all. They're about the writing, the pacing and the how unbelievably dull the show is.
- dmix 4y ago
  People will always ignore flaws if it’s entertaining. The fact LOTR was boring and uneventful makes the other flaws more glaring.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- smcl 4y ago
  People were up in arms before a single episode aired, because they saw a fictional species (dwarf) had dark skin. many of those people have now pivoted their arguments against the show to being about pacing, writing (note: I’m in no way implying this is you, I haven’t seen any LotR series opinions on HN) - but the racist stuff has already occurred
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Yes, this is like people being up in arms that DC decided to cast a Black woman to play an orange alien from Tamarin.
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    But the fact that some people were racist does not preclude others from just not liking the show.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    I wonder how well it would go down if someone made a show about slavery in USA with all of the black people being played by non-blacks... For inclusivity you know? Get some Asians there. Maybe gender swap the historical big figures to boot and have them speak Chinese or something.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
aaron695 4y ago
Amazon's relationship with IMDB as been very fair. They have kept their data open and downloadable https://m.imdb.com/interfaces/ https://m.imdb.com/interfaces/ They did shutdown the forums. But moderating is every companies nightmare these days. Their reviews and ratings are world class and very accurate (There are known issues like nationalism in certain countries, but it's easy to cope) This is disappointing. But no other company would ever rate their own streaming with accurate ratings like Amazon do. It must be be disappointing to spend over half a billion $ and end up with the mess they have. They do delete brigadeing like when people downvoted Godfather to get The Dark Knight to 1. Maybe wait and see?
MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
„New: Movie critics and fans have disagreed about blockbusters more this year than any time this century. I went through the top 10 movies from every year for the past 22 years, and this is what I found.“ https://twitter.com/lucas_shaw/status/1564014563229515776 https://twitter.com/lucas_shaw/status/1564014563229515776
vivegi 4y ago
Some percentage of those who left those 1-star rating may be pissed off enough to cancel their Prime subscription in protest. (It may also be true that some percentage of those who cancel Prime for this reason may rejoin Prime a couple of months from now when the Prime retention machine sends them a 'We miss you!' email trigger offering free trials of Prime for x months to get them back back).
- bombcar 4y ago
  I don’t even know how the gauge the success of something like this - in prime subscriptions not canceled?
tomohawk 4y ago
The bee nailed the review: https://babylonbee.com/news/rings-of-power-review-game-of-thrones-meets-simcity-meets-glee-and-i-am-here-for-it https://babylonbee.com/news/rings-of-power-review-game-of-th... but the trailer did make it seem compelling https://babylonbee.com/news/exclusive-scene-from-the-rings-of-power--outtakes https://babylonbee.com/news/exclusive-scene-from-the-rings-o...
- pvaldes 4y ago
  The squirrel killed me. I can't breath, LOL...
user3939382 4y ago
Never heard of it, but Hollywood writers already bend over backwards to shoehorn their woke religion into nearly every TV and movie show so if that’s related I’ll avoid.
noisy_boy 4y ago
At this point, it will require truly innovative production for me to care about dangers looming over a kingdom/world/universe from which only the our-last-hope hero can deliver. Be it LOTR or Marvel or DC or whatever.
topspin 4y ago
Say something nice about TRoP. The thing that's got me interested is the entrance of Gandalf (I presume.) Dropped in from the heavens like an alien, found in a smoldering crater, clearly baffled by up-close Arda, can't speak "the" language, mystified by corporeal-ness, almost simian. The writers had enough of a clue to see the opportunity in making Gandalf's backstory a meaningful subplot, so they're developing it with some care, and that's pretty cool. Also, the Elves aren't perfect, one dimensional beings it total harmony with all things. You've got politics, cowardice, rebellion and other stuff there. Morfydd Clark's Galadriel is ok. Reserving the benefit of the doubt there because there is a long way to go and it's a huge part for any actor. Finally, Owain Arthur's Durin in Khazad-dûm was well acted (if not entirely well written at points.) Very memorable. I think people are expecting a life changing experience from TRoP and aren't getting it, or something. It's just more streaming TV, and far from the worst of that. House of the Dragon is ok too, but one nice thing with TRoP is the absence of soft porn and disturbing torture scenes. That stuff is fine for HotD but it's also good to see story telling that won't resort to that.
- quelltext 4y ago
  Do we need spoilers here? Didn't know that was Gandalf. Aside from that I agree, so far TRoP has been close to or better than expected. I'm not sure what people expected here but at any rate it's too early. You would't want to judge LotR based only on the initial chapter either.
  - topspin 4y ago
    > Do we need spoilers here? Sincerely sorry. And yet... > Didn't know that was Gandalf. My point, exactly.
    - appleflaxen 4y ago
      - thfuran 4y ago
SergeAx 4y ago
Today's flagship TV series economy is boiling down to this: cause as many _(re)subscriptions_ as possible, everything else doesn't matter. So from economy standpoint it is profitable to delete discouraging negative reviews. We know for a long time that Amazon (owns IMDb) will do almost anything for money. No news here.
naillo 4y ago
Wonder what people who like to employ the "it's their website, they can do whatever they want" argument feels about this.
redox99 4y ago
When websites remove reviews for "review bombing", I have never ever seen them also remove the "reverse review bombing", basically the people that give it an undeserved 10 to "make up" for the review bombing or whatever. And that is clearly happening here https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings
- yakubin 4y ago
  Sometimes IMDB gets 10/10 reviews before the films are even aired anywhere on Earth. It's magical.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    and 1/10 too.
elorant 4y ago
Well, we live in the age where the story hardly matters. I saw Top Gun the other day, and was shocked at how bad it was. The aerial stuff was superb, but everything else looked so amateurish. Acting was hideous, the story was so predictable and boring there was hardly any substance to the film. And yet it got an 8,5 rating at imdb.
- HL33tibCe7 4y ago
  Matt Damon went into some detail about why movies are like this nowadays: https://youtu.be/gF6K2IxC9O8 https://youtu.be/gF6K2IxC9O8
  - HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
    Interesting, but the DVD vs post-DVD part of it doesn't make sense without more explanation or numbers attached. In the DVD era most people didn't buy expensive DVDs - they rented them from Blockbuster (then later Netflix) just as they had done before on VHS. In the post-DVD era there is still plenty of money coming after the theatrical release in the form of money from streaming services. How does this source of revenue compare to that of the DVD era, and, if it's significantly different, then why? One thing that's different nowadays is how quickly movies go from theatre to streaming, but that's under control of the movie studio - presumably they expect to make more money this way. Perhaps the real problem is the cost of producing, and marketing, these Hollywood movies in the first place, making it necessary for everything to be a mega-hit to be successful.
    - elorant 4y ago
      What I take from what he said is that the shelf life of movies has shortened. You either make it in the first couple of weeks, or you’re bust. While with the dvds the movie stayed relevant for much longer which could result in a reduced budget for marketing.
      - HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
        The reduced shelf life part of it - you need to make money from the theatrical release, not after - certainly seems to be what he is saying, but it's not clear why that is the case. If the studio makes more money from ticket sale revenue sharing, than from streaming (or previously DVD rental), then why are they now rushing to streaming so quickly? To speculate: Blockbuster used to be utterly dominant in the VHS/DVD rental era, and there would be prominently displayed in-store advertising of what in-theatre movies were coming to DVD/Rental soon, as well as the new releases getting their own section in the store. Perhaps in-store DVD rental therefore created it's own marketing and extended shelf life, as opposed to online streaming rental where the customer likely already knows what they are looking for a opposed to being influenced by "coming-soon and newly-released" in-store marketing. The lack of variety of movies in the US, to which Damon is responding, is also at least in part because there is, for whatever reason, no culture of arts cinemas here. The whole industry is geared up for the economics of large budget movies and the de-risking that involves.
m_ransing 4y ago
So negative reviews has escalated very quickly. Bot or not, I normally trust IMDB ratings. Any movie with rating 6 and above is at least one time watchable. Any series having rating less than 6.5 is not worth. There could be exceptions off course. Are there any interesting incidence of purposefully negative reviews on imdb? One I know of is [1]. The Indian movie Gunday was bomb shelled by Bangladeshi community as some historical reference was not proper. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/t https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/t he-story-behind-the-worst-movie-on-imdb/
kmfrk 4y ago
The simplest explanation would be that IMDb (Amazon, basically) removed reviews posted before the episodes had even aired, but is this what actually happened?
shadowgovt 4y ago
Did they delete the reviews that were left before the show aired?
Rant423 4y ago
I choose to ignore user reviews/ratings altogether. On IMDB right now 60% of the ratings (not reviews) are either 1 or 10 [1], and that's completely ridicolous. I much prefer the critics' scores - and right now they're 84% on RT [2] and 71 on Metacritics [3]. Which are reasonable numbers. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rt https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rt [2] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_rings_of_power/s01 https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_... [3] https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-rings-of-power/season-1 https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-ring...
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  How is RT better? 100% of RT scores are either 1 or 10.
  - Rant423 4y ago
    That's not how it works. Yes, RT scores are binary, but that's not the same as saying that "rotten" means 1/10 and "fresh" means 10/10.
    - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
      Yeah, that’s not the same. That sounds worse to me, so the question stands, how is it better?
      - Rant423 4y ago
        Please note that I'm talking about critics' ratings: RT has them and IMDB doesn't. So it's better for me, as I value known critics more than random people.
- vagrantJin 4y ago
  Critics are the experts. A fanatic, while crazy, has skin in the game. Their time and money. I'll take a fanatics POV over an experts everyday of the week and Sundays too.
drittich 4y ago
Perhaps I'm an outlier. But, I thought I'd post my thoughts in case others get dissuaded from trying the show based on all the negative feedback. Note, I've only watched the first episode. I watched the show with two other people, of very different interests and ages. We all enjoyed it immensely. - The sets, costumes, and cinematography are fantastic and at times breath-taking. The level of detail in the costumes is amazing, and I can't really imagine them being better. - The acting is first-rate. IMO it's better overall than the acting in LoTR, or at least as good, and better than in most shows you'll watch. I did not see an actor that was not all-in for their role, and the many accents are beautifully done. This is the most important quality of any show for me. - The language in the script is elevated, and there are some beautiful lines. Scenes are allowed to develop, without the need for the rapid cuts many shows feature/rely on. - Plot is fine! I have not seen where it will go yet, but there are some big plot points, and subtle tensions developing. I had no problem here. I love LoTR, but am not a dedicated Tolkien fan with rules about how things must be. I am fine with spin-offs, re-imaginings, alternate worlds, whatever! IMO the goal here is to entertain, to capture the imagination, and to do work that shows dedication to the craft and I think the show easily succeeds in all of those. I would probably watch a full season just for the production value alone. Also, the whole race thing: What? To me it's a complete red herring and everyone in the show belongs there. This is not just gate-keeping, but racism plain and simple. If countering that racism is your only reason to watch the show, that's a good enough reason.
- GordonS 4y ago
  Wow, it's like we watched two different shows! While the style of the characters clothing is there, it all looks brand new, totally pristine. Just like the characters themselves, all of whom are plastered with impeccable make up. I found it looked silly and amateurish. On the narrative, I found it overly formal, like it was being recited word for word from Shakespeare or something - it doesn't feel at all like a screenplay, more like actors reading from a book. And I think this impacts terribly on the acting, which I found to be wooden, stiff and unrealistic.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
cainxinth 4y ago
Amazon, which owns IMBD, is pushing this thing hard. I have turned off every single setting in Alexa related to hunches, promotions, suggestions, etc. I loathe when I ask for the weather and she concludes with “…by the way, I can also…” But I still got a reminder that this show was available when I asked what time it was the other day.
- secondcoming 4y ago
  That sounds awful, having ads read out to you. Makes me glad I’ve never been tempted to get an Alexa
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    Same. I just had a feeling that was going to happen. Hoping things like Mycroft with home assistant will be good. I've been meaning to try mycroft but haven't yet. https://mycroft.ai/?cn-reloaded=1 https://mycroft.ai/?cn-reloaded=1
- sjroot 4y ago
  The first time I heard one of those “I can also” lines, I lost interest in ever purchasing an Alexa or frankly any Amazon home product. Shame the amount of engineering effort that went into that system, only for it to be destroyed by absurd business strategy. I’m sure a couple PMs got a “level 2 to level 3” promotion out of it or something.
  - cainxinth 4y ago
    I usually just cut her off and cuss at her. I'm hoping Amazon is tracking how frequently people verbally assault Alexa to optimize the UX, but that's probably wishful thinking.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  I mean that's kind of par for the course for having an Amazon spy center in your home...
retinaros 4y ago
I am the first one shouting about wokeness destroying shows but here it is not the case. the show is just cheap looking in the way its shot. why didnt they hire some teams from hbo?? the black elf character is actually cool and well acted, the dwarf character while horrible in the way they wrote it, is not really woke. its just bringing diversity to the show and definitly not something I am against.
bombcar 4y ago
Amazon owns IMDB - they could easily put a “minutes watched” next to each review, and let you sort/filter by that.
- dewey 4y ago
  And what interesting data point would that give you? "A lot of people watched that" isn't really a metric for the quality of anything.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    You could filter out the reviews with less than an hour of view time.
  - tchock23 4y ago
    It’s a useful metric on Steam where you can disregard reviews from players with low time spent playing the game, so I imagine it would be useful in this scenario as well.
bumblebritches5 4y ago
unknownus3r 4y ago
I wouldn’t have given it 1-star maybe 3-4/10. The visual effects, costumes, landscapes are incredible, it may be worth watching for those alone. Everything else is basically syfy tier garbage. The whole point of LOTR was that it was this quixotic tale of good vs evil where the good guys were incredibly faithful to their quest and to each other (aside from boromir). It had this almost childlike idealism but you wanted it to be real and to believe and it somehow felt plausible. It was incredibly well written. This show didn’t have the source material to pull dialogue from and so they come up with these ridiculous boat and rock analogies that are laughably stupid. Aside from that, most of the show is boring. The entire second episode for Galadriel was pointless. The hobbits are annoying, the soap opera romance between the Persian girl and the black elf is excruciating, really the dwarves are the only fun and well acted part of the episode. The elves have no majesty. In LOTR, the elves were always this demigod-like beings who move and act with supernatural grace but in this they just seem like rich people. It just isn’t LOTR
dhruval 4y ago
When a woke / inclusive show gets reviewed poorly, what fraction of it gets chalked up to audience bigotry ? There are excellent shows that are woke / inclusive (Arcane) and they are universally liked by much of the same audiences. Then there are medicore shows that are woke / inclusive (Foundation) and they get mixed reviews again from similar audiences. According to this action by IMDB which is owned by Amazon, if you rated the show below a 5 then you are automatically a bigot. Which seems heavy handed, and like a big conflict of interest to say the least.
- stiltzkin 4y ago
  Foundation was so disappointing.
amir734jj 4y ago
As an avid movie enthusiast and IMDb user this concerns me. I have been using IMDb for years writing my reviews and reading other people's opinions not just for high budget movies but also for smaller self funded movies. This is not good for their independence and honesty.
jwie 4y ago
The scale of IMDb reviews makes them more vulnerable to review bombing than other review aggregators. Steam gets the scale this right by only having up or down reviews, and collecting reacts to the review to sort out what people think of the review. They shouldn’t have removed all negative reviews, and it earned its 3/10. But having a tighter scale removes the 1/10s outsized drag on the average.
Aleksdev 4y ago
Tolkien fans are very serious about lore. The negative reviews seem to be more about lore. Personally, I get it. The LoTR trilogy is a timeless classic. Of course, nothing can compare.
neonsunset 4y ago
I'm not going to complain about the fact the series is pushing shoehorned agenda and the quality of everything else is sacrificed in its favour, no. However, I'm going to complain that people quick to accuse any criticism of racism/sexism/anythingism might just end up willing whatever blame they put on people they dislike into existence, to their own detriment.
pier25 4y ago
I thought it was mediocre overall but Amazon is doing this to prevent review bombing. Presumably because the IMDB rating appears in the Prime app
- appleflaxen 4y ago
  > Amazon is doing this to prevent review bombing I think that's the complaint. Is review bombing somehow illegitimate? If so, what separates a "bomb" review from a legitimate review?
  - Gareth321 4y ago
    I now read "review bombing" as "I don't like the opinions of fans."
  - pier25 4y ago
    Bombing results in a bias but couldn't the same be said of any review system? Even on Steam the reviews are biased to people that bought the game and are interested in the genre. It's not an objective score by the majority of people.
- dudul 4y ago
  I wonder if there is a plan to remove all the 10/10 that are just there to "own the haters". Review bombing goes both ways, somehow we always only hear about one side.
betwixthewires 4y ago
Of course. Is anyone surprised? This is not a "owned by amazon fuck bezos" comment. All review sites are bogus. All review numbers are bogus. YouTube like/dislike ratios, reddit vote counts, it's all bogus. You can't rely on anyone else telling you whether you should like something or not. That shortcut is gone forever. People will game it in an effort to game your life.
Markoff 4y ago
Anyone still use IMDb since they removed forums? Moved to TMDb at that time, old IMDb posts can be found backed up on Moviechat.
rowanG077 4y ago
I honestly don't get why IMDB would do this. They have now created a very strong signal their review scores are unreliable as they changed it simply because they didn't like it. Why would they damage their own brand like that? As for the show itself I can't comment since I haven't seen it.
SunlightEdge 4y ago
To be maybe controversial... I'm still thinking about it, but I do wonder if diverse casting works in European fantasy stories. The problem I have is that it generally pulls me out of the experience/ makes it less immersive. I welcome diverse castings in modern shows (though we don't need every show to follow a template 'diverse' casting). A common counter argument is, well you can suspend your disbelief and imagine a dragon, so why is a diverse community in a small village not ok? It just feels less immersive. Yes, I can go along with it - but I'm not sure it works. It feels like the modern world superimposed in a fantasy setting. I'd prefer to be sent to an alien world. It is problematic, as years of discrimination in the real world for women/ethnic minorities were wrong and we should encourage equality in the corporate world. However the entertainment industry I wonder should in some ways be exempt. Maybe. One area where there isnt a discussion on 'diversity' is music and also novels. This is because there are tons of tons of novels and music bands to listen to. No one cares if a particular band is 'diverse'. So I wonder if the only solution out of all of this, is to have more shows - yes, make diverse inclusive European fantasy shows, but also make traditional european fantasy shows too etc. What I think will happen is that in such a scenario most European fantasy fans will choose traditional like shows. Because the story is more immersive and you are brought more into this old world. Maybe. Like I say, I'm still undecided. For modern/futuristic films I find diverse castings just as immersive.
- cush 4y ago
  The only thing that pulls people out is garbage writing and acting
- UnpossibleJim 4y ago
  Well, in Tolkien's case it was meant to be proto European mythology. It would also look out of place to place a lot of European or Asian characters in a proto African mythology story. I don't think it's racist to have a story set in a place where peoples of a particular race are all that habitate there. The modern world is just that, modern. A medieval fantasy world has to play by those rules, in its own sort of ways. They're still walking and riding on horses, and magic is exceedingly rare in Tolkien's world. People don't just travel about.
lordentropy 4y ago
Good god! It must be really hard to make anything these days. If you don't put enough people of color, people will shout of bigotry. If you include a few, some will accuse of wokeness and review bomb it to hell. I'm just glad that the show got made!
- bergenty 4y ago
  People are more pissed off about the feminist bullshit in the show. Galadriel a warrior? Give me a fucking break, puke.
  - regularjack 4y ago
    What's wrong with Galadriel being a warrior? Seems like a pretty cool character to me. Also, just because she's a warrior that's feminism? I guess she should be in the kitchen instead.
    - bergenty 4y ago
      Yes it is feminism. It’s an attempt to draw false parity between the sexes by suggesting the woman can do everything a man can.
  - lordentropy 4y ago
    Another bigot. So hard to please everyone.
  - ironcurtain 4y ago
    spoilers Not only she’s a warrior but she’s single-handedly killed a snow troll who was thrashing the rest of her male companions. In LOTR it took 8 males to deal with a cave troll. She’s a strong independent woman indeed.
FunnyBadger 4y ago
I don't watch Woke. Never watching Rings of Power, period, ever.
stevievee 4y ago
If only these studios appreciated that they could compound the value of the IP by rallying the existing fans (ie. "early adopters") instead of trying to jump straight to the "majority" audience. It is just corporate greed mixed with hubris. The Foundation tv show is another example of this short-sighted approach.
docmars 4y ago
It's simple: go woke and go broke; and the joke's on them because this season cost them nearly $1bn.
- docmars 4y ago
  I can only imagine the downvoters drunkenly sloshing their beer around in despair as they scoff at the makings of their demented world falling apart and people like myself telling it how it is. It's the best form of entertainment; it's exactly as I expected. :)
irrational 4y ago
I love the wheel of time book series. I knew the reviews of the tv show were quite poor, but decided to watch the episodes anyway. Deep regret. I’m writing this while wearing a Lord of the Rings t-shirt. I love Lord of the Rings, but I’ve leaned my lesson. I’m going to trust the reviews and not waste my time watching this show.
astrange 4y ago
If I owned a review site I would delete all positive reviews of my own products, to build character.
tikiman163 4y ago
The other day 8 looked at the IMDB score for the Rings of Power. The score was something like a 3 out of 10, but what caught my eye is the number of user reviews was nearly 200,000. That is way higher than it should be at this point. The problem is that people who haven't even seen it are creating Imdb accounts just so they can give it a negative review. This happened with the all female Gohst Busters movie as well. After the trolls got board they stopped filtering the reviews and it wound up around something like a 7, which is pretty accurate. That Ghost Busters movie wasn't amazing or bad, it was just average, and trolls who had a problem with the premise refused to watch it, which is fine, but then also gave it a 1 star user review just because they hated the idea which isn't.
Razengan 4y ago
They also seem to be removing any mention of this on Reddit, and it’s not mentioned on Wikipedia either. This kind of shit makes me want to never watch the show in spite.

575 points by danskeren 4y ago

Kiro 4y ago

People are upset not because the show is bad but because it's not as bad as they expected. In fact, it's quite good. This ruins their mockery narrative.

simonh 4y ago
I do worry about that. The extremely negative sentiment IMHO is vastly out of any proportion to the quality of the show. Frankly, much of the criticism was based on misunderstandings of the characters and what Tolkien actually wrote anyway. It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s nowhere near as dire as the anti-hype suggests. If it had come out without any connection to Tolkien, or the truly cringeworthy marketing, I think it would be doing fine.
nathias 4y ago
what, no I really wanted it to be watchable, but it isn't
tgv 4y ago
Really? Then again, I'm not upset, nor did I find it good. It's quite boring and bland. It focuses on a few characters instead of a large quest, but those characters are, well, empty. There's little to nothing that spells greater things to come. And they talk in this pseudo-archaic English ("What say thee of thy tidings, ye olde Master?", you get the idea), but still use words like the noun "project" in its modern sense. And the music for the first Hobbit/Harfoot scene sounds like the bloody Sims. It's a pretty mediocre 5, perhaps 6, out of 10 rating from me. Back to your statement: where did you get that people "are upset not because the show is bad but because it's not as bad as they expected"? Are there really that many people with the desperate desire to mock it? OTOH, nearly 40% rated it a 10. Where does that come from, then? I suppose that a few people with bots could also be an explanation.
- Kiro 4y ago
  > Are there really that many people with the desperate desire to mock it? Yes, the most thumbed down trailer of all-time and a big meme culture based on how bad it was going to be, how they ruined Tolkien completely etc. Now when the show is not the 1/10 trainwreck they expected all those memes become invalidated and this infuriates the mob.

HeavyStorm 4y ago

I even have imdb installed here on my phone. Has always been my go to site for movies ratings, and I would defend that their top 50 movie lists reflected the real best movies... Why would they erode trust in their platform like this...

fonque99 4y ago

...they even use fake text length error messages to prevent you from submitting negative reviews. What I did: 1.) I wrote a review with 5 stars and tried to submit it. There was a red error message saying the text would be below 600 characters so I couldn't submit it. 2.) I copied a lengthy random text into the submission field so it was 1000 characters++ - still the same error message 3.) I switched to a 6 star rating. Suddenly the error message magically disappeared and I could submit it. 4.) I toggled back and forth between 4, 5, 6 and 7 stars. After a few tries I could submit the review with 5/10 on Sept 5th. 5.) I even got a confirmation email with a link where I can track my contribution. Text said "Thank you for your contribution - this item is awaiting processing by our data editors. Estimated processing date - 6 September 2022" 6.) You can guess yourself if my review has been processed... Like all other reviews below 6/10, it doesn't show up on the review page. 6/10 is still the lowest reviews available: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=userRating&dir=asc&ratingFilter=0 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=userRating... =>>> Try by yourselves if you experience the same stuff. We've had reports of deleted reviews, too. I guess it's clear that they're manipulating on a large scale. I wouldn't be surprised if the 6.7 overall rating is manipulated, too.

fonque99 4y ago

It's getting more and more hilarious. my 5/10 review has been blocked since Sept 5 now. In the prime app they claim an imdb rating of 7.4 whereas on the website it's only 6.7. What a joke.

ftyhbhyjnjk 4y ago

danskeren 4y ago

Not sure if IMDb has a history of deleting negative user reviews made in good faith, but worth noting that IMDb and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (TV series) are both owned by Amazon.

nicolas_t 4y ago
They didn't seem to delete user reviews for Lightyear made by all the bigots that were offended by having two women kissing in the movie so it seems that there's some preferential treatment for Amazon properties. And deleting negative reviews by bigots at least would be more defensible than deleting negative reviews from fans of Tolkien who take issue with the treatment of the work they love. EDIT: I still haven't seen the show yet and I originally thought the issue with review bombing was similar to people like me hating the show foundation on Apple TV... I see now that people claim that a lot of negative reviews were due to the race of characters and people claiming the "show is too woke". In that case, it's actually more of a similar situation to Lightyear. Still, it's very interesting to see the differing treatment of Lightyear, a pixar property compared to this, an Amazon show.
- SSLy 4y ago
  what's wrong with the foundation btw?
  - nicolas_t 4y ago
    It's jarringly different from the books. Names are the same and a very few elements are similar but it's really something completely different. In Asimov's work, psychohistory is not about specific heroes or great people changing things but more about the inexorable trend leading to certain outcomes. The repeated sci-fi action scenes don't really match with the original work. That said, it's not a bad show if you watch it not having read the books. There are some decent original ideas, I liked the idea of the genetic dynasty. But, it's not Asimov's foundation, it's so different that it can hardly be said to be inspired by it. So, I wouldn't be complaining about it if it had a different name. Taking a series of well beloved books and deciding to so loosely adapt them that the end results has almost no relationship to the books feels disrespectful to me though.

trasz 4y ago

Nothing that’s controlled by a corporation can ever be trusted.

Lacerda69 4y ago
Nothing that’s controlled by someone else can ever be trusted [blindly and completely].
- trasz 4y ago
  Of course, but with non-corporate entities you can take precautions; see Open Source projects. Corporations, on the other hand, have economic incentives to screw you over, and eventually always will.

fredski42 4y ago

Ah. Didn’t know IMDB was owned by Amazon. Put’s all ratings on Prime in a different perspective.

sofixa 4y ago
> Didn’t know IMDB was owned by Amazon Yep. That's what enables Prime Video's X-Ray where you can see details about the actors and music of a particular scene while watching, and what also makes it impossible for competitors such as Netflix to have a similar feature. If IMDB were separate, the data would probably be accessible to anyone.
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  IMDB is the only provider of this type of data?
  - subsistence234 4y ago
  - dewey 4y ago
    No, there's a bunch of other companies doing that but they are not as consumer facing as IMDb. One would be: https://www.gracenote.com/tv-and-movie-data/ https://www.gracenote.com/tv-and-movie-data/
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  C-more use IMDb ratings in their streaming app. So it is possible for competitors to buy access to this data. I also think that minute to minute music and actor info is not sourced from IMDb. And I’d be surprised if Netflix couldn’t at least to it for their own properties. I think there is a fundamental difference in how the two services go about things. On Netflix it can be quite the challenge to even see cast and director and it is difficult to browse by such categories. Netflix sees themselves as the purveyor of advanced recommendations.
- hobofan 4y ago

pseudo0 4y ago

Interesting to contrast the IMDB rating with Rotten Tomatoes, not owned by Amazon, which currently has an audience rating of 38%. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_rings_of_power https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_... In my opinion, Steam does the best job of handling this tricky problem by leaving all reviews up and transparently letting the user pick whether or not to include periods of "unusual activity".

yakubin 4y ago
Nit: I'm seeing 36%.
- timbit42 4y ago
  People are still submitting ratings.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  Suppose the show had been extremely faithful to the source material and hordes of Tolkien fans had reviewed it well. Would similar logic apply? That their good reviews should be deleted because they would be mostly useless to the broader audience?
- hdcivhd6 4y ago
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    I have trouble making sense of your comment. I believe people would like the ratings of a show to reflect its quality and be somewhat informative. Brigading by a subpopulation with vastly different interest to the general public interferes with that and that legitimises removing their reviews as far as I’m concerned.

mountainb 4y ago

Could be construed as illegal to do this user the FTC act.

nathanaldensr 4y ago

nathanaldensr 4y ago

We are not allowed to state opinions that do not agree with our woke corporate masters, it seems. What are they so afraid of?

ngetchell 4y ago
What does woke have to do with anything?
- djbebs 4y ago
  Did you not watch the episodes that are out?
  - ngetchell 4y ago
    I've now watched the episodes. Woke still has nothing to do with this. It more seems like internet trolls are complaining they see a darker skinned person on their TV and the news media is happy to run with that story.
- speedgoose 4y ago
  The show is bombed with bad reviews because some people don’t like some aspects of the show, that they find "woke".
- ufo 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - BrainVirus 4y ago
    People are grumpy because Amazon gutted LotR universe, made it an empty vessel for their political ideology and now refuse to deal with well-earned criticism in an honest fashion.

Ecstatify 4y ago

Current standing on IMDB: The Rings of Power - 6.2 stars (42K ratings) House of the Dragon - 8.8 stars (75K ratings)

indigodaddy 4y ago
I have to believe that the HoD IMDb rating is being pumped up by a rabid fanbase, even though the show is in fact, a pile of garbage. RoP IMO is quite a lot better. I enjoyed the first episode.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  House of Dragons has an anti-fan base. The most popular subreddit for game of thrones content is based around hating the source material: https://old.reddit.com/r/freefolk/ https://old.reddit.com/r/freefolk/
- johnfn 4y ago
  Hm. The fanbase from GoT was rabid, I'll give you, but rabid with negativity - they hated the ending, and a lot of them soured on the entire show after it was over. LoTR has an equally rapid fanbase, I'd say, but they were much more uniformly positive towards the source material. Then again, maybe that's why - the GoT fans are pleasantly surprised that HotD isn't a disaster, whereas the LoTR fans are upset that it's not as good as they'd expect.
  - indigodaddy 4y ago
    It sure seemed like a disaster 30 minutes in. I guess I’ll continue with it and see..
- Nimitz14 4y ago
  Your opinion is an extremely rare one, if you weren't already aware. The consensus is the opposite.

somehnacct3757 4y ago

All crowd-sourced online aggregation is bogus. Every single form of it has someone placing their finger on the scale one way or the other. If it isn't a familial corporation it's for-hire bot farms, perhaps even hired by your competition. Or maybe it's the aggregator themselves, running a digital protection racket. Instead, go read a full review written by a trusted curator.

nicbou 4y ago
There isn't always a trusted curator. Most of the time, there isn't.
- nvr219 4y ago
  I generally rely on my friends' recommendations because they know me (and watch a lot more TV than I do somehow)
thrown_22 4y ago
>Instead, go read a full review written by a trusted curator. That's the point, trusted curators have been drifting further and further from what the majority of people find good for a long time. What critics find good and what the target audience finds good are not the same: https://youtu.be/eFRWDZBH8Dc?t=745 https://youtu.be/eFRWDZBH8Dc?t=745
- soco 4y ago
  I'm split about this. Is it good or bad? Should we only read and appreciate what the masses read and appreciate? On one hand yeah it would make sense, confirmation of the masses is a thing and not everybody can be wrong. But on the other hand everybody is different and different biases make for different preferences. When I read reviews on the web I always take time to read the negatives to see what they found as negative. Many times that's just bull (valid also about the positives btw), people having beef with whatever, but sometimes they point out interesting bits. And it takes me much less time to read such reviews (and I also learn more) than by watching the entire contents.

glogla 4y ago

I have not seen it myself, but every criticism I've read so far was complaining about "mandatory woke". Some reviews also mentioned other things they don't like, like costumes not being good or fights being cinematic instead of subdued or characters appearing where they shouldn't be if you take Silmarillion into accord ... but I have not read even one review that didn't include some version of "I hate it because it has black people in it" - whether calling it political, woke, "not true to source with regards to casting" or whatever. I am not overstating it - literally one hundred percent of reviews I have seen were about people not liking it because there are non-white people in it.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
I don’t think all critics of “mandatory woke” can be boiled down to “I hate it because it has black people in it”. I mean I wouldn’t personally use the world woke because it looks mostly devoid of meaning but as a European, the mandatory diversity in American production has reached a point where it sometimes gets very funny. I don’t really mind it because it doesn’t affect the narrative structure of what you are watching most of the time but I must confess that I did roll my eyes at black characters acting normally in the middle of a tavern in medieval Europe recently.
- simonh 4y ago
  There were black peoples, or at least Middle Eastern, all over Medieval Europe. The Arthurian cycle has moorish knights. When Eleanor of Aquitaine married the English king, part of her dowry was a North African city. Are we to believe none of them travelled to England? Berber pirates raided Iceland for slaves so there were whites people in Africa, why not black people in Europe? Some people travelled a lot. The Saxons sent emissaries to what’s now Sri Lanka, while an Armenian Christian monk born in Beijing met the pope and Edward I. In Middle Earth the Numenorians had extensive colonies in the far south of the continent. This obsession with racial segregation is absurd and utterly ahistorical.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago

lloppal 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220903103220/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=1 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903103220/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104125/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=2 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104125/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104126/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=3 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104126/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104131/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=4 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104131/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104824/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=5 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104824/https://www.imdb.... indeed all show zero results. Anything higher than a 5, does show results: https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104206/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=6 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104206/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104208/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=7 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104208/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104210/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=8 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104210/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104822/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=9 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104822/https://www.imdb.... https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104818/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=helpfulnessScore&dir=desc&ratingFilter=10 https://web.archive.org/web/20220903104818/https://www.imdb.... Now, one can have lots of opinions about 0/10 reviews, but they surely have just the same right to exist as similarly extreme 10/10 reviews.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I have to admit that I did chuckle a little at some of the 10/10 quotes ( caps preserved ): << As a REAL Tolkien fan, I couldn't have asked for any better. Anyone who complains otherwise isn't a Tolkien fan, but a Peter Jackson fan, and can't accept someone new showing their creative vision for the lore. << They STORY is ALSO EXCELLENT IF you LISTEN! (Abhorrently, that seems so infinitely difficult for some to do). TRUE, that there is a much longer than necessary scene 2/3's of the way through which almost put me to sleep (and it is the reason I am not giving this a 10) << As said above, I will not deny there is some mediocrity, but I cannot fathom why/how a massive 30% of all the ratings are 1 stars... does not seem genuine to me. << This is honestly already on par or better than game of thrones << Listen...we know it is not book accurate. Much of The Lord of The Rings and Hobbit movies (modern era non cartoon versions) weren't either. NO length of television show or movie could capture what Tolkien put on pages. So GET OVER IT. I agree they should have kept at least few 1s for pretends.

JadoJodo 4y ago

I understand that Bezos spent a TON of money on this, but the way he’s forcing it is kinda crazy. The ads for it are EVERYWHERE. I was trying to check out at Whole Foods yesterday and had to sit through a 5s ad for it when I opened the Amazon shopping app (just to get to the Prime member barcode). Deleting reviews to “guarantee” success is just sad.

selimthegrim 4y ago
Also on the side of Amazon delivery vans.
- dmix 4y ago
  And the Amazon boxes you get delivered have LOTR graphics on them
  - sprkwd 4y ago
    And the loading screens in Adobe products have LotR based graphics on them as well.
  - propogandist 4y ago
    with Amazon Prime raising rates routinely, they want customers to engage with Prime Video, which is really a loss leader that's meant to keep consumers renewing Prime membership. Amazon boxes is premium real estate and it costs them nothing to advertise. Its helping drive awareness, as you recalled the ad and specifically where you saw it, which is a strong signal for advertisers that want to infiltrate your mind.
lake_vincent 4y ago
The whole thing reeks of Bezos wanting to be cool. You can almost hear his desperate cries for approval through the poorly written, and poorly delivered, script. Honestly, just watch the first scene. It's hilariously soulless. (This is all my opinion. Others are entitled to feel differently)
doitLP 4y ago

Karellen 4y ago

I don't get reviews saying that TRoP, or some other new prestige TV series, is "terrible", or "a disaster", based on the first couple of episodes. Some really excellent TV series have taken more than a whole 26-episode season before they find their rhythm and get properly good. ST:TNG is a classic example, but I'm pretty sure you can come up with others. And some people are claiming that a new series totally worthless, not based on the first series, but based on the first episode? Are you kidding me? I mean, is it OK if the first episode of a series is unevenly paced, and contains too much exposition, and clunky "tell, don't show" dialogue about who the main characters are and what their deal is? No, no it isn't. We should ask that writers do better, and trust audiences to have the patience to learn who characters are through action over the course of a few episodes. But just because they don't do those things, is it really worth writing off the next 5 (or however many) seasons of a show, based on one episode? Who does that? What does anyone gain from that? OK, there's a lot of prestige serialised TV out there now, and you probably can't watch all of it even if you wanted to, so some culling is probably necessary at some stage. But does anyone really have to write something off quite so soon? You can't even give it half a season to try and get up to speed? I don't get it.

sarchertech 4y ago
People were saying the show was going to be terrible based on promo images.
- coldtea 4y ago
  And they were right too
thrown_22 4y ago
I want to know if it is worth watching a series while it's airing. It may not be fair, but I have more important things to do with my time than give mind share to mega corp projects which are poorly executed. These aren't some small teams labours of love which I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to.
narag 4y ago
I agree. The first two episodes of The Rings of Power are unbearably boring. But let's wait. Anyway, IMDb ratings are getting totally unreliable to me. I wasted hours of my life that won't come back, watching some show called The Terminal List that scored a solid eight. Carnage of Asimov's Foundation is 7.4 and that... thing, The Wheel of Time 7.1. I wonder if there's a way to see evolution of rating, for me Star Trek Discovery seasons are nine, seven, two, pass... but it's holding at 7 right now.

farleykr 4y ago

My issue with the show has nothing to do with the “woke” stuff mentioned here. I don’t like it because none of the heroes are likable. All of them have some form of sticking it to the man and doing what they want as their story line. True heroes are self-sacrificial and reluctant. Contrast Galadriel who acts like a self righteous dickhead with Aragorn who was reluctant to accept his calling spent and three movies proving himself to be worthy of honor and love and then going to what he thought was certain death to give Frodo a chance to destroy the ring. The gender or race of the characters in TRoP is not the point. It’s that they’re all unlikable because they don’t love and respect others.

isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
Don't you think that 2 episodes is a bit too little to judge the entire series like that? The show covers A LOT more time than LOtR did, there's plenty of space for character development. Galadriel was not exactly likeable when she participated in the first kinslaying, or when she ran away from the war of wrath.
- throw0101c 4y ago
  > The show covers A LOT more time than LOtR did, there's plenty of space for character development. The first two episodes of TRoP are 90 minutes each, for a total run time of three hours. Three hours is about the run time of the first LoTR movie (Fellowship): how much story were they able to tell in those three hours? Further, the other epic fantasy series, House of Dragons, also has released two episodes: how much story have they been able to tell? What are the reviews of that franchise? The TRoP series may not end up sucking after the first eight episodes, but having the first two (allegedly: haven't seen it myself) suck seems to be a waste of everyone's time/effort/money.
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
    I'm not saying it's of the same caliber as the trilogy, but it's definitely not garbage which deserves one star. It's already better than the hobbit, however low of a bar that is.

bowsamic 4y ago

I don't blame review sites for deleting "outrage reviews". I really don't think they say anything about the quality of the thing, just that there is some current rage going on. These are usually deleted on Steam too, in fact I think they have some kind of algorithm to detect when it is happening. I don't think such reviews should really be counted in the same category as normal reviews since they are just based on outrage rather than the actual content

nathias 4y ago

the show deserves 3/4 at best, I haven't seen anything so expensive this bad, it's really weird that this much money can't buy quality in any of the aspects of the show

lotsofpulp 4y ago
Because too much of the money goes to the intellectual property owner as rent. And also, prequel/sequel stuff that was not originally mapped out by the author is usually crap.
- nathias 4y ago
  I don't think thats the case, its this forcing of current US politics into writing that doesn't have the skill to include it in a seamless way to be compatible with world building and storytelling. Also the CGI that's really the highest point for a lot of people seems really bad to me, everything looks so plastic ...
- rocmcd 4y ago
  Absolutely has nothing to do with the IP owner. That much money (as well as being tied to a big name like Amazon) attracts the antithesis of creativity, where everything becomes ‘plastic’ (someone above called it a ‘wax museum’ which is a good way to put it) and means anything remotely controversial or original will be killed dead.
seanalltogether 4y ago
My guess is that because they threw so much money at this, they also put too many cooks in the kitchen. You're gonna end up killing all creativity if it has to get rubber-stamped by a long line of "producers".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

tjpnz 4y ago

I think people with legitimate criticisms are starting to get really tired being called a racist or a misogynist. 99% of the reviews aren't about wokeness at all. They're about the writing, the pacing and the how unbelievably dull the show is.

dmix 4y ago
People will always ignore flaws if it’s entertaining. The fact LOTR was boring and uneventful makes the other flaws more glaring.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
smcl 4y ago
People were up in arms before a single episode aired, because they saw a fictional species (dwarf) had dark skin. many of those people have now pivoted their arguments against the show to being about pacing, writing (note: I’m in no way implying this is you, I haven’t seen any LotR series opinions on HN) - but the racist stuff has already occurred
- scarface74 4y ago
  Yes, this is like people being up in arms that DC decided to cast a Black woman to play an orange alien from Tamarin.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  But the fact that some people were racist does not preclude others from just not liking the show.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I wonder how well it would go down if someone made a show about slavery in USA with all of the black people being played by non-blacks... For inclusivity you know? Get some Asians there. Maybe gender swap the historical big figures to boot and have them speak Chinese or something.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

aaron695 4y ago

Amazon's relationship with IMDB as been very fair. They have kept their data open and downloadable https://m.imdb.com/interfaces/ https://m.imdb.com/interfaces/ They did shutdown the forums. But moderating is every companies nightmare these days. Their reviews and ratings are world class and very accurate (There are known issues like nationalism in certain countries, but it's easy to cope) This is disappointing. But no other company would ever rate their own streaming with accurate ratings like Amazon do. It must be be disappointing to spend over half a billion $ and end up with the mess they have. They do delete brigadeing like when people downvoted Godfather to get The Dark Knight to 1. Maybe wait and see?

MrBuddyCasino 4y ago

„New: Movie critics and fans have disagreed about blockbusters more this year than any time this century. I went through the top 10 movies from every year for the past 22 years, and this is what I found.“ https://twitter.com/lucas_shaw/status/1564014563229515776 https://twitter.com/lucas_shaw/status/1564014563229515776

vivegi 4y ago

Some percentage of those who left those 1-star rating may be pissed off enough to cancel their Prime subscription in protest. (It may also be true that some percentage of those who cancel Prime for this reason may rejoin Prime a couple of months from now when the Prime retention machine sends them a 'We miss you!' email trigger offering free trials of Prime for x months to get them back back).

bombcar 4y ago
I don’t even know how the gauge the success of something like this - in prime subscriptions not canceled?

tomohawk 4y ago

The bee nailed the review: https://babylonbee.com/news/rings-of-power-review-game-of-thrones-meets-simcity-meets-glee-and-i-am-here-for-it https://babylonbee.com/news/rings-of-power-review-game-of-th... but the trailer did make it seem compelling https://babylonbee.com/news/exclusive-scene-from-the-rings-of-power--outtakes https://babylonbee.com/news/exclusive-scene-from-the-rings-o...

pvaldes 4y ago
The squirrel killed me. I can't breath, LOL...

user3939382 4y ago

Never heard of it, but Hollywood writers already bend over backwards to shoehorn their woke religion into nearly every TV and movie show so if that’s related I’ll avoid.

noisy_boy 4y ago

At this point, it will require truly innovative production for me to care about dangers looming over a kingdom/world/universe from which only the our-last-hope hero can deliver. Be it LOTR or Marvel or DC or whatever.

topspin 4y ago

Say something nice about TRoP. The thing that's got me interested is the entrance of Gandalf (I presume.) Dropped in from the heavens like an alien, found in a smoldering crater, clearly baffled by up-close Arda, can't speak "the" language, mystified by corporeal-ness, almost simian. The writers had enough of a clue to see the opportunity in making Gandalf's backstory a meaningful subplot, so they're developing it with some care, and that's pretty cool. Also, the Elves aren't perfect, one dimensional beings it total harmony with all things. You've got politics, cowardice, rebellion and other stuff there. Morfydd Clark's Galadriel is ok. Reserving the benefit of the doubt there because there is a long way to go and it's a huge part for any actor. Finally, Owain Arthur's Durin in Khazad-dûm was well acted (if not entirely well written at points.) Very memorable. I think people are expecting a life changing experience from TRoP and aren't getting it, or something. It's just more streaming TV, and far from the worst of that. House of the Dragon is ok too, but one nice thing with TRoP is the absence of soft porn and disturbing torture scenes. That stuff is fine for HotD but it's also good to see story telling that won't resort to that.

quelltext 4y ago
Do we need spoilers here? Didn't know that was Gandalf. Aside from that I agree, so far TRoP has been close to or better than expected. I'm not sure what people expected here but at any rate it's too early. You would't want to judge LotR based only on the initial chapter either.
- topspin 4y ago
  > Do we need spoilers here? Sincerely sorry. And yet... > Didn't know that was Gandalf. My point, exactly.
  - appleflaxen 4y ago
    - thfuran 4y ago

SergeAx 4y ago

Today's flagship TV series economy is boiling down to this: cause as many _(re)subscriptions_ as possible, everything else doesn't matter. So from economy standpoint it is profitable to delete discouraging negative reviews. We know for a long time that Amazon (owns IMDb) will do almost anything for money. No news here.

naillo 4y ago

Wonder what people who like to employ the "it's their website, they can do whatever they want" argument feels about this.

redox99 4y ago

When websites remove reviews for "review bombing", I have never ever seen them also remove the "reverse review bombing", basically the people that give it an undeserved 10 to "make up" for the review bombing or whatever. And that is clearly happening here https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings

yakubin 4y ago
Sometimes IMDB gets 10/10 reviews before the films are even aired anywhere on Earth. It's magical.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  and 1/10 too.

elorant 4y ago

Well, we live in the age where the story hardly matters. I saw Top Gun the other day, and was shocked at how bad it was. The aerial stuff was superb, but everything else looked so amateurish. Acting was hideous, the story was so predictable and boring there was hardly any substance to the film. And yet it got an 8,5 rating at imdb.

HL33tibCe7 4y ago
Matt Damon went into some detail about why movies are like this nowadays: https://youtu.be/gF6K2IxC9O8 https://youtu.be/gF6K2IxC9O8
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  Interesting, but the DVD vs post-DVD part of it doesn't make sense without more explanation or numbers attached. In the DVD era most people didn't buy expensive DVDs - they rented them from Blockbuster (then later Netflix) just as they had done before on VHS. In the post-DVD era there is still plenty of money coming after the theatrical release in the form of money from streaming services. How does this source of revenue compare to that of the DVD era, and, if it's significantly different, then why? One thing that's different nowadays is how quickly movies go from theatre to streaming, but that's under control of the movie studio - presumably they expect to make more money this way. Perhaps the real problem is the cost of producing, and marketing, these Hollywood movies in the first place, making it necessary for everything to be a mega-hit to be successful.
  - elorant 4y ago
    What I take from what he said is that the shelf life of movies has shortened. You either make it in the first couple of weeks, or you’re bust. While with the dvds the movie stayed relevant for much longer which could result in a reduced budget for marketing.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
      The reduced shelf life part of it - you need to make money from the theatrical release, not after - certainly seems to be what he is saying, but it's not clear why that is the case. If the studio makes more money from ticket sale revenue sharing, than from streaming (or previously DVD rental), then why are they now rushing to streaming so quickly? To speculate: Blockbuster used to be utterly dominant in the VHS/DVD rental era, and there would be prominently displayed in-store advertising of what in-theatre movies were coming to DVD/Rental soon, as well as the new releases getting their own section in the store. Perhaps in-store DVD rental therefore created it's own marketing and extended shelf life, as opposed to online streaming rental where the customer likely already knows what they are looking for a opposed to being influenced by "coming-soon and newly-released" in-store marketing. The lack of variety of movies in the US, to which Damon is responding, is also at least in part because there is, for whatever reason, no culture of arts cinemas here. The whole industry is geared up for the economics of large budget movies and the de-risking that involves.

m_ransing 4y ago

So negative reviews has escalated very quickly. Bot or not, I normally trust IMDB ratings. Any movie with rating 6 and above is at least one time watchable. Any series having rating less than 6.5 is not worth. There could be exceptions off course. Are there any interesting incidence of purposefully negative reviews on imdb? One I know of is [1]. The Indian movie Gunday was bomb shelled by Bangladeshi community as some historical reference was not proper. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/t https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/t he-story-behind-the-worst-movie-on-imdb/

kmfrk 4y ago

The simplest explanation would be that IMDb (Amazon, basically) removed reviews posted before the episodes had even aired, but is this what actually happened?

shadowgovt 4y ago

Did they delete the reviews that were left before the show aired?

Rant423 4y ago

I choose to ignore user reviews/ratings altogether. On IMDB right now 60% of the ratings (not reviews) are either 1 or 10 [1], and that's completely ridicolous. I much prefer the critics' scores - and right now they're 84% on RT [2] and 71 on Metacritics [3]. Which are reasonable numbers. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rt https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rt [2] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_rings_of_power/s01 https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_... [3] https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-rings-of-power/season-1 https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-ring...

LudwigNagasena 4y ago
How is RT better? 100% of RT scores are either 1 or 10.
- Rant423 4y ago
  That's not how it works. Yes, RT scores are binary, but that's not the same as saying that "rotten" means 1/10 and "fresh" means 10/10.
  - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
    Yeah, that’s not the same. That sounds worse to me, so the question stands, how is it better?
    - Rant423 4y ago
      Please note that I'm talking about critics' ratings: RT has them and IMDB doesn't. So it's better for me, as I value known critics more than random people.
vagrantJin 4y ago
Critics are the experts. A fanatic, while crazy, has skin in the game. Their time and money. I'll take a fanatics POV over an experts everyday of the week and Sundays too.

drittich 4y ago

Perhaps I'm an outlier. But, I thought I'd post my thoughts in case others get dissuaded from trying the show based on all the negative feedback. Note, I've only watched the first episode. I watched the show with two other people, of very different interests and ages. We all enjoyed it immensely. - The sets, costumes, and cinematography are fantastic and at times breath-taking. The level of detail in the costumes is amazing, and I can't really imagine them being better. - The acting is first-rate. IMO it's better overall than the acting in LoTR, or at least as good, and better than in most shows you'll watch. I did not see an actor that was not all-in for their role, and the many accents are beautifully done. This is the most important quality of any show for me. - The language in the script is elevated, and there are some beautiful lines. Scenes are allowed to develop, without the need for the rapid cuts many shows feature/rely on. - Plot is fine! I have not seen where it will go yet, but there are some big plot points, and subtle tensions developing. I had no problem here. I love LoTR, but am not a dedicated Tolkien fan with rules about how things must be. I am fine with spin-offs, re-imaginings, alternate worlds, whatever! IMO the goal here is to entertain, to capture the imagination, and to do work that shows dedication to the craft and I think the show easily succeeds in all of those. I would probably watch a full season just for the production value alone. Also, the whole race thing: What? To me it's a complete red herring and everyone in the show belongs there. This is not just gate-keeping, but racism plain and simple. If countering that racism is your only reason to watch the show, that's a good enough reason.

GordonS 4y ago
Wow, it's like we watched two different shows! While the style of the characters clothing is there, it all looks brand new, totally pristine. Just like the characters themselves, all of whom are plastered with impeccable make up. I found it looked silly and amateurish. On the narrative, I found it overly formal, like it was being recited word for word from Shakespeare or something - it doesn't feel at all like a screenplay, more like actors reading from a book. And I think this impacts terribly on the acting, which I found to be wooden, stiff and unrealistic.
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cainxinth 4y ago

Amazon, which owns IMBD, is pushing this thing hard. I have turned off every single setting in Alexa related to hunches, promotions, suggestions, etc. I loathe when I ask for the weather and she concludes with “…by the way, I can also…” But I still got a reminder that this show was available when I asked what time it was the other day.

secondcoming 4y ago
That sounds awful, having ads read out to you. Makes me glad I’ve never been tempted to get an Alexa
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Same. I just had a feeling that was going to happen. Hoping things like Mycroft with home assistant will be good. I've been meaning to try mycroft but haven't yet. https://mycroft.ai/?cn-reloaded=1 https://mycroft.ai/?cn-reloaded=1
sjroot 4y ago
The first time I heard one of those “I can also” lines, I lost interest in ever purchasing an Alexa or frankly any Amazon home product. Shame the amount of engineering effort that went into that system, only for it to be destroyed by absurd business strategy. I’m sure a couple PMs got a “level 2 to level 3” promotion out of it or something.
- cainxinth 4y ago
  I usually just cut her off and cuss at her. I'm hoping Amazon is tracking how frequently people verbally assault Alexa to optimize the UX, but that's probably wishful thinking.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I mean that's kind of par for the course for having an Amazon spy center in your home...

retinaros 4y ago

I am the first one shouting about wokeness destroying shows but here it is not the case. the show is just cheap looking in the way its shot. why didnt they hire some teams from hbo?? the black elf character is actually cool and well acted, the dwarf character while horrible in the way they wrote it, is not really woke. its just bringing diversity to the show and definitly not something I am against.

bombcar 4y ago

Amazon owns IMDB - they could easily put a “minutes watched” next to each review, and let you sort/filter by that.

dewey 4y ago
And what interesting data point would that give you? "A lot of people watched that" isn't really a metric for the quality of anything.
- bombcar 4y ago
  You could filter out the reviews with less than an hour of view time.
- tchock23 4y ago
  It’s a useful metric on Steam where you can disregard reviews from players with low time spent playing the game, so I imagine it would be useful in this scenario as well.

bumblebritches5 4y ago

unknownus3r 4y ago

I wouldn’t have given it 1-star maybe 3-4/10. The visual effects, costumes, landscapes are incredible, it may be worth watching for those alone. Everything else is basically syfy tier garbage. The whole point of LOTR was that it was this quixotic tale of good vs evil where the good guys were incredibly faithful to their quest and to each other (aside from boromir). It had this almost childlike idealism but you wanted it to be real and to believe and it somehow felt plausible. It was incredibly well written. This show didn’t have the source material to pull dialogue from and so they come up with these ridiculous boat and rock analogies that are laughably stupid. Aside from that, most of the show is boring. The entire second episode for Galadriel was pointless. The hobbits are annoying, the soap opera romance between the Persian girl and the black elf is excruciating, really the dwarves are the only fun and well acted part of the episode. The elves have no majesty. In LOTR, the elves were always this demigod-like beings who move and act with supernatural grace but in this they just seem like rich people. It just isn’t LOTR

dhruval 4y ago

When a woke / inclusive show gets reviewed poorly, what fraction of it gets chalked up to audience bigotry ? There are excellent shows that are woke / inclusive (Arcane) and they are universally liked by much of the same audiences. Then there are medicore shows that are woke / inclusive (Foundation) and they get mixed reviews again from similar audiences. According to this action by IMDB which is owned by Amazon, if you rated the show below a 5 then you are automatically a bigot. Which seems heavy handed, and like a big conflict of interest to say the least.

stiltzkin 4y ago
Foundation was so disappointing.

amir734jj 4y ago

As an avid movie enthusiast and IMDb user this concerns me. I have been using IMDb for years writing my reviews and reading other people's opinions not just for high budget movies but also for smaller self funded movies. This is not good for their independence and honesty.

jwie 4y ago

The scale of IMDb reviews makes them more vulnerable to review bombing than other review aggregators. Steam gets the scale this right by only having up or down reviews, and collecting reacts to the review to sort out what people think of the review. They shouldn’t have removed all negative reviews, and it earned its 3/10. But having a tighter scale removes the 1/10s outsized drag on the average.

Aleksdev 4y ago

Tolkien fans are very serious about lore. The negative reviews seem to be more about lore. Personally, I get it. The LoTR trilogy is a timeless classic. Of course, nothing can compare.

neonsunset 4y ago

I'm not going to complain about the fact the series is pushing shoehorned agenda and the quality of everything else is sacrificed in its favour, no. However, I'm going to complain that people quick to accuse any criticism of racism/sexism/anythingism might just end up willing whatever blame they put on people they dislike into existence, to their own detriment.

pier25 4y ago

I thought it was mediocre overall but Amazon is doing this to prevent review bombing. Presumably because the IMDB rating appears in the Prime app

appleflaxen 4y ago
> Amazon is doing this to prevent review bombing I think that's the complaint. Is review bombing somehow illegitimate? If so, what separates a "bomb" review from a legitimate review?
- Gareth321 4y ago
  I now read "review bombing" as "I don't like the opinions of fans."
- pier25 4y ago
  Bombing results in a bias but couldn't the same be said of any review system? Even on Steam the reviews are biased to people that bought the game and are interested in the genre. It's not an objective score by the majority of people.
dudul 4y ago
I wonder if there is a plan to remove all the 10/10 that are just there to "own the haters". Review bombing goes both ways, somehow we always only hear about one side.

betwixthewires 4y ago

Of course. Is anyone surprised? This is not a "owned by amazon fuck bezos" comment. All review sites are bogus. All review numbers are bogus. YouTube like/dislike ratios, reddit vote counts, it's all bogus. You can't rely on anyone else telling you whether you should like something or not. That shortcut is gone forever. People will game it in an effort to game your life.

Markoff 4y ago

Anyone still use IMDb since they removed forums? Moved to TMDb at that time, old IMDb posts can be found backed up on Moviechat.

rowanG077 4y ago

I honestly don't get why IMDB would do this. They have now created a very strong signal their review scores are unreliable as they changed it simply because they didn't like it. Why would they damage their own brand like that? As for the show itself I can't comment since I haven't seen it.

SunlightEdge 4y ago

To be maybe controversial... I'm still thinking about it, but I do wonder if diverse casting works in European fantasy stories. The problem I have is that it generally pulls me out of the experience/ makes it less immersive. I welcome diverse castings in modern shows (though we don't need every show to follow a template 'diverse' casting). A common counter argument is, well you can suspend your disbelief and imagine a dragon, so why is a diverse community in a small village not ok? It just feels less immersive. Yes, I can go along with it - but I'm not sure it works. It feels like the modern world superimposed in a fantasy setting. I'd prefer to be sent to an alien world. It is problematic, as years of discrimination in the real world for women/ethnic minorities were wrong and we should encourage equality in the corporate world. However the entertainment industry I wonder should in some ways be exempt. Maybe. One area where there isnt a discussion on 'diversity' is music and also novels. This is because there are tons of tons of novels and music bands to listen to. No one cares if a particular band is 'diverse'. So I wonder if the only solution out of all of this, is to have more shows - yes, make diverse inclusive European fantasy shows, but also make traditional european fantasy shows too etc. What I think will happen is that in such a scenario most European fantasy fans will choose traditional like shows. Because the story is more immersive and you are brought more into this old world. Maybe. Like I say, I'm still undecided. For modern/futuristic films I find diverse castings just as immersive.

cush 4y ago
The only thing that pulls people out is garbage writing and acting
UnpossibleJim 4y ago
Well, in Tolkien's case it was meant to be proto European mythology. It would also look out of place to place a lot of European or Asian characters in a proto African mythology story. I don't think it's racist to have a story set in a place where peoples of a particular race are all that habitate there. The modern world is just that, modern. A medieval fantasy world has to play by those rules, in its own sort of ways. They're still walking and riding on horses, and magic is exceedingly rare in Tolkien's world. People don't just travel about.

lordentropy 4y ago

Good god! It must be really hard to make anything these days. If you don't put enough people of color, people will shout of bigotry. If you include a few, some will accuse of wokeness and review bomb it to hell. I'm just glad that the show got made!

bergenty 4y ago
People are more pissed off about the feminist bullshit in the show. Galadriel a warrior? Give me a fucking break, puke.
- regularjack 4y ago
  What's wrong with Galadriel being a warrior? Seems like a pretty cool character to me. Also, just because she's a warrior that's feminism? I guess she should be in the kitchen instead.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    Yes it is feminism. It’s an attempt to draw false parity between the sexes by suggesting the woman can do everything a man can.
- lordentropy 4y ago
  Another bigot. So hard to please everyone.
- ironcurtain 4y ago
  spoilers Not only she’s a warrior but she’s single-handedly killed a snow troll who was thrashing the rest of her male companions. In LOTR it took 8 males to deal with a cave troll. She’s a strong independent woman indeed.

FunnyBadger 4y ago

I don't watch Woke. Never watching Rings of Power, period, ever.

stevievee 4y ago

If only these studios appreciated that they could compound the value of the IP by rallying the existing fans (ie. "early adopters") instead of trying to jump straight to the "majority" audience. It is just corporate greed mixed with hubris. The Foundation tv show is another example of this short-sighted approach.

docmars 4y ago

It's simple: go woke and go broke; and the joke's on them because this season cost them nearly $1bn.

docmars 4y ago
I can only imagine the downvoters drunkenly sloshing their beer around in despair as they scoff at the makings of their demented world falling apart and people like myself telling it how it is. It's the best form of entertainment; it's exactly as I expected. :)

irrational 4y ago

I love the wheel of time book series. I knew the reviews of the tv show were quite poor, but decided to watch the episodes anyway. Deep regret. I’m writing this while wearing a Lord of the Rings t-shirt. I love Lord of the Rings, but I’ve leaned my lesson. I’m going to trust the reviews and not waste my time watching this show.

astrange 4y ago

If I owned a review site I would delete all positive reviews of my own products, to build character.

tikiman163 4y ago

The other day 8 looked at the IMDB score for the Rings of Power. The score was something like a 3 out of 10, but what caught my eye is the number of user reviews was nearly 200,000. That is way higher than it should be at this point. The problem is that people who haven't even seen it are creating Imdb accounts just so they can give it a negative review. This happened with the all female Gohst Busters movie as well. After the trolls got board they stopped filtering the reviews and it wound up around something like a 7, which is pretty accurate. That Ghost Busters movie wasn't amazing or bad, it was just average, and trolls who had a problem with the premise refused to watch it, which is fine, but then also gave it a 1 star user review just because they hated the idea which isn't.

Razengan 4y ago

They also seem to be removing any mention of this on Reddit, and it’s not mentioned on Wikipedia either. This kind of shit makes me want to never watch the show in spite.