Barbie appears to be the latest female-led movie getting review bombed

Make sure you’re sitting down for this stunning revelation, but: The internet is frequently a Bad Place where Bad People do what they can to spread misery. One example of this is the practice of “review bombing,” where groups of people express their displeasure with something by going to review aggregation platforms and leaving negative review en masse. Though there are… probably examples of it being done for good reasons, it’s usually more of a collective tantrum with the most childish of justifications.

And now it seems to be happening to Barbie, specifically on Rotten Tomatoes. As noticed by MovieWeb, the “Audience Score” for the Greta Gerwig film is hovering around 86 percent positive (based on thousands of verified ratings from regular people), as compared to 90 percent from critics. But, if you bring unverified ratings into it, which is to say random strangers hiding behind entirely anonymous usernames, that number drops to 74 percent positive.

That’s not an extremely dramatic dip, but if you skim through the user reviews, there are a handful of aggressively negative ones. The movie not knowing what “demographic” it was for is an oddly common complaint, and there’s one that simply says “all in for equal rights not for delusional thinking.” Of course, people are allowed to dislike things, even things that get generally positive reviews from critics (surely not everyone is lying when they say they like Zack Snyder movies), but this kind of thing does happen relatively frequently to movies aimed at anything but a straight, white, male audience or with anything but a straight, white, male lead.

Just a few months ago, IMDb instituted a new ratings calculation specifically for The Little Mermaid after noticing “unusual voting activity” surrounding it. Similarly, Billy Eichner’s Bros received hundreds of one-star reviews on Rotten Tomatoes after it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival but before its actual wide release.