‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’: Alt-Right Group Claims They Messed With Rotten Tomatoes Score

Critics were raving over Star Wars: The Last Jedi, heralding it as one of the best entries in the saga and unlike any other installment to date. But when it finally hit theaters, some fans weren’t as receptive.

The movie’s audience score on Rotten Tomatoes has come to encapsulate the discussion about the movie, seemingly splitting the fanbase in half over whether it was good or not. But after recent comments, the validity of those results could be doubted.

One person who identifies as a member of the “alt-right” claimed partial responsibility for the film’s audience score on the review aggregator, saying that he helped create bots to tank the score, according to the Huffington Post.

“There were supposed to be a trilogy of books and then some after set in the Legends canon. But [Lucasfilm executives] Kathleen Kennedy and Pablo Hidalgo wanted to pursue their own feminst [sic] agenda,” the anonymous person wrote. “I was never going to like The Last Jedi anyway because [it] erases everything the EU ever did.”

Of course, others on sites like 4Chan and Facebook have also claimed credit for tanking the audience score of the film creating bots that would log-in through Facebook’s social media feature and giving it negative scores.

They also claim an error caused the bots to leave negative reviews for Guillermo del Toro’s merman romance film, The Shape of Water. However, Rotten Tomatoes itself has disputed the report.

Of course, a review aggregator that prides itself on being an unbiased and accurate portrayal of audience and critics’ preferences would not likely own up to being compromised, nor would attention-seeking trolls admit that they are simply taking credit for something they have nothing to do with.

The sequel trilogy has always been divisive among Star Wars fans, but nothing has been as polarizing as Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It’s an example of living in the Internet age, where snap judgments and internet arguments dominate the discourse and how rare anyone ever admits to being wrong or making a mistake.

Time will be the determining factor of how this movie stands in the franchise, much like nearly every other Star Wars film before it.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is now playing in theaters everywhere.