A Look At The Acolyte User Scores

While user scores at sites like IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic are not the be all end all and will never tell any individual viewer whether or not he or she will like something, they are still a good indicator of what the general consensus by viewers is. High or low ratings almost always have their good reasons, and that reason is not “review bombing” despite what some media outlets claim. So how do things look for The Acolyte? Click through for a closer look!

Spoiler

It may come as no surprise, and it was also reported by the media previously, that the user ratings for The Acolyte are not positive, in fact, we are now entering territory never before explored by Star Wars proper, if you ignore The Holiday Special.

The Acolyte user score on IMDB: 4.0 (it declined by 0.2 points after episode 3)
The Acolyte user score on Rotten Tomatoes: 20% (it declined by 6 points after episode 3 and now is even below Batwoman on Rotten Tomatoes)
The Acolyte user score on Metacritic: 4.1 (I did not track Metacritic)

Now about review bombing… I examined the robustness of user scores with statistical methods (aka actual maths and not just “feelings”) on these sites several years ago and also looked at correlations between box office success and user scores (I looked at movies back then, not tv shows). And IMDB is, generally speaking, the most robust site, it is least prone to actual review bombing. Things on Rotten Tomatoes are usually a lot more extreme, the general trend is identical, almost always, but the scores on RT have much higher highs and much lower lows. Box office and user scores are also correlated, but not as strongly as one might think. Many niche movies get very high scores, some very successful things have pretty mediocre ratings. So user scores are not always an indicator for success or failure, but generally speaking they are, your chance of success is higher if the user scores are high, but there are outliers (arthouse Oscar bait movies often get good scores by the 100 people who watched them). Metacritic is used by very few people and therefore a small number of trolls can impact the score there a lot more. The Acolyte barely has 1k user votes on this site.

The Acolyte has currently a little less than 35k user scores on IMDB, Ahsoka has 117k at the moment.

IMDB also, according to them, implements various mechanisms to counteract review bombing, they do not disclose it, but it has been said that for the average score only users with an actual voting history may at times be considered, preventing new accounts that vote a “1” or “10” from having an impact on average scores.

Either way, the narrative that this is all review bombing is, as usual, rather simplistic and at times amounts to gaslighting.

Especially IMDB usually has pretty reasonable user scores, scores that a majority of fans or people who watched it will often agree with or understand at least why the score is what it is.

To provide a few other examples I hand-picked a few controversial things:

The Rings of Power: 7.0 (357k votes)
The Marvels: 5.5 (129k votes)
Madame Web: 3.9 (69k votes)
Ghosbusters 2016: 6.8 (248k votes)
Obi-Wan Kenobi: 7.1 (232k votes)
The Book of Boba Fett: 7.2 (189k votes)
The Bad Batch: 7.8 (56k votes)
Star Wars Resistance: 5.3 (barely 8k votes – this was the lowest rated proper Star Wars show or movie alongside the Caravan of Courage Ewok movie until now, I exclude The Holiday Special here, this has an astounding 2.2)
Willow: 5.7 (34k votes – and this show was even deleted from existence)
Wish: 5.6 (38k votes)
Indiana Jones 5: 6.5 (202k votes)

For the record, Andor has an 8.4. Even people who dislike it or find it boring will probably understand why it has this very high user score for a Disney+ show, only The Mandalorian is rated even better with 8.6. but that is because of the early seasons.

Many of these things were hotly debated and often diskiked by the usual YouTube sphere, but as you can see user scores are not really impacted by any of this. Actually, the scores for the various Star Wars shows are often really good, much better than the onlinesphere at times may make you believe. Sometimes viewers agree with certain YouTube circles, sometimes they don’t. Rings of Power was generally well received by actual audiences, as were things often hated online like Obi-Wan Kenobi. Even the much ridiculed Ghostbusters 2016 movie has a pretty good IMDB score. And the few people who bothered to watch Indiana Jones last year thought it was mostly ok (something I more or less agree with, it was not the utter trainwreck people online often made it to be, but also far from being actually great). Whereas utter trainwrecks like Madame Web get one of the lousiest scores for a mainstream big budget movie ever. And Willow’s utterly mediocre score also seems more than justified given how it was a ratings failure on Disney+ and was subsequently even deleted from the platform, never to be seen again. But even Willow has a substantially better score than The Acolyte…

What I am saying is, these scores are not all the result of review bombing, even the mega flop The Marvels has a score that seems more or less “fair”, it was a mega flop for a reason.

The narrative for most Star Wars shows on YouTube and elsewhere was pretty similar to what we have for The Acolyte. Much was made of Reva in Kenobi, a narrative similar to what we have for The Acolyte. Yet the scores for Obi-Wan Kenobi are pretty decent regardless.

So in my opinion the current 4.0 for The Acolyte on IMDB at least is a fair representation of what a majority of people who vote on these sites think. Not bots. Not a global review bombing conspiracy. People who actually bothered to watch it and genuinely do not like what they are seeing.

And this is a massive problem. It seems Lucasfilm could finally lose the fanbase with The Acolyte. They were more than willing to overlook the silly and dumb things in previous shows, because those previous shows, despite all these occasional bad things, still provided some solid entertainment or nostalgic memberberries.

Will this have an impact on Skeleton Crew which is released in November? A show, as far as we can tell, about a bunch of young kids with only one adult lead, Jude Law.

What I am asking is this: could The Acolyte have a lasting negative impact on Star Wars? Is it the straw that will break the camel’s back? Or will people forget about it, move on and Skeleton Crew will be judged by its own merits or failings? And any subsequent offerings of Lucasfilm as well? Or could this be the beginning of a major shift?

What do you think? Will it be inconsequential? Or have a lasting impact?

• The Nielsen Streaming Charts For The Acolyte - Week 6
• To The Surprise Of No One: Lando Project Is Dead
• The Nielsen Streaming Charts For The Acolyte - Week 5
• Lucasfilm Releases First Official Stills For Skeleton Crew
• The Nielsen Ratings For The Acolyte - Week 4
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