Rotten Tomatoes Denies ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ Low Audience Score Is Fake, Says 100% Authentic

In response to others taking credit for Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s low audience score, Rotten […]

December 20, 2017, 10:59am

In response to others taking credit for Star Wars: The Last Jedi‘s low audience score, Rotten Tomatoes has decided to set the record straight.

Videos by ComicBook.com

For those unaware, there’s a big disparity between The Last Jedi’s critics score (currently 93%) and the audience score, which sits at 55%. There were some in the community who decided to take credit for manipulating that low score, but Rotten Tomatoes spokesperson (and Fandango vice president of communications) Dan Benson cleared the record up, saying that score is 100% authentic.

“We have several teams of security, network, and social database experts who constantly monitor reviews and ratings to ensure that they are genuine,” Benson told Forbes. “They haven’t seen anything unusual with The Last Jedi, except that there has been an uptick in the number of written user reviews submitted. Aside from that, everything is normal and we don’t see any unusual activity. We looked at The Last Jedi compared to other blockbusters and it has been consistent with those past films.”

Benson explained that The Last Jedi has a “comparable number of reviews to The Force Awakens” but can’t nail down why there is such a chasm between the critical score and the audience score.

“I can’t explain why there’s such a disparity,” Benson said. “How we take this is that people are super passionate about this movie. On the positive side, our site is popular, and it has become an important platform for debate and discussion.”

What Benson can say though is that no Facebook group or slew of bots is the reason for the score, as that can be solely attributed to the fans and their reactions.

“We’ve been working around the clock to get the numbers right,” Benson said. “Authenticity is very important to us. We have security teams, network teams, database teams who work so hard, it’s a little disheartening for them to see people make such [accusatory] claims without knowing the facts.”

That chasm is largest in the franchise’s history (regarding Rotten Tomatoes), as The Lat Jedi currently has a -38 gap, with the closest competitor being Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith at -14.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi currently enjoys an 84.15 on ComicBook.com’s composite ranking, which you can vote in here.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is in theaters now.