The reviews are in, and despite the mass effort among “tastemakers” with far too much time on their hands barraging Bros with negative reviews, the Luke Macfarlane and Billy Eichner gay rom-com is a hit. Well, a “hit” from the people who actually watched the film. Comedies in general (nevermind R-rated romcoms) are pretty poorly represented and have mostly under performed in 2022’s box office, no one’s been showing up for much of anything unless it had previous IP. Bros, being touted as technically the first mainstream, wide theatrical release, original, romantic comedy starring a same-sex couple struggled to connect with audiences despite earning rave reviews. I heard somewhere that everybody is a critic. But I haven’t gotten a check from anybody for all the criticism I do, and I’m out here complaining about shit all day every day. Is Bros a test case that theatrical comedies are in a major slump or was it targeted effort of a review-bombing campaign?
Review-bombing is the toxic practice where users dedicate misplaced energy to bombard a movie with negative reviews to affect its overall rating and deter potential viewers from consuming it. Review-bombing is nothing new. Review-bombers are messed up people. To feel so angry about something that you feel the need to go online and try to downvote it is laughably pathetic. Personally, I feel like review sites should do a bit more to vet the reviews since some of these are bad faith and some poor reviews might be legitimate. But that would require work ($) and opens IMDB up to accusations of favoritism, so they take the easier and cheaper way out of allowing every opinion, no matter how EFFing stupid.
Why do we even need Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB’s numerical rating system? The simplest way to end review bombing would be to do away with user reviews. Hollywood did just fine without those for decades.
Critics of the Roger Ebert school already grade based on the degree to which a movie succeeds at its goals, such as whether or not a movie is fun, regardless of Cahiers du Cinema-style analysis. The point of professional critics is for detailed, exhaustive, and articulate analysis of the high and low brow, and everything in between. But audience reviewers reduced Ebert’s methodology to the At the Movies thumbs up/thumbs down scale, refusing to detail why and how a film meets with their approval, beyond, perhaps a list of adjectives with no case made in their defense. One can’t just say the writing or acting is “bad” without some grounding in why it didn’t engage them.
I understand that websites like giving users opportunities to engage, since it gives them a reason to keep coming back. However, a lot of people are misusing these opportunities and engaging with bad faith. If Metacritic is well regularly poisoned by people reacting to how they think the movie will be, it’s a less useful resource; but only those savvy enough to realize “oh, all these nasty reviews clearly come from people who disagree with the perceived politics of the movie” would know to ignore it. I keep thinking of the decline of Yelp as an example: as it became a more strident place where people only dealt in extremes, it became less useful, and eventually a ghost town; the generally accepted belief was that you can’t trust a Yelp review. I suppose people use google reviews now, but I don’t know what has kept it from becoming a similar cesspool. My guess would be the reliance on real names and the close connection between a google account and personal identity.
These sites really need to figure out a way to stop this themselves because it completely ruins the audience review / rating feature. Figure out a way to force people to prove they have seen the movie. Have them answer a handful of randomized questions about the movie or provide a ticket stub. If it leads to some people who actually did see a movie not being able to review it while all of these trolls go away, it will be worth it.Now that we’ve got a mainstream release of a queer romcom, I want a gay action hero. That’ll make some tiny minds explode.