Amazon Blocks Reviews Of Lord Of The Rings Reboot After Show Bombs With Viewers

Posted September 6, 2022 by with 18 comments

I’d rather chew on salt-covered shards of glass than even think about watching this mundane garbage (I’m still pissed that I wasted 10 hours seeing all the movies in theaters 20 years ago), but apparently there are some people still willing to give the new Lord Of The Rings Amazon series a chance. Unfortunately, after watching it, most of these people are f*cking pissed. In response, Amazon has turned off the user ratings while suspending the review system on their streaming platform. Pathetic, via THR:

The mega-budget fantasy series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is under fire from some of its viewers. A day after the first two episodes of Amazon’s billion-dollar baby debuted on Prime Video, the show’s average audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is a “rotten” 37 percent, and reviews on Amazon have been outright suspended.

How The Rings of Power is doing on Amazon’s own user review ecosystem is not yet clear because the company has taken the unusual step of suspending user ratings for the show. An Amazon source says reviews are being held 72 hours to help weed out trolls and to ensure each review is legitimate. The source later claimed Prime Video started the policy this summer on all its shows.

“Review bombing” is when a group of online users post numerous negative reviews for a product or service due to its perceived cultural or political issues rather than its actual quality. Perusing Rotten Tomatoes’ audience reviews for Rings of Power, there are some one-star entries that meet the definition. “They wanted to involve such an important work with current politics and they have succeeded,” reads an example. “Nobody has a problem with seeing people of color in movies, series or stories … but this story was already written and should not have been sullied.” Opined another: “Reflecting world diversity in Middle Earth is an odd goal, albeit good for marketing maybe, but it was clearly more important then [sic] making a functional TV series.”

But the majority of the negative reviews — whatever the writers’ private feelings — criticized the show for non-diversity reasons. “They spent a billion dollars on backdrops and a film score,” wrote one. “The rest is slow moving, wooden acting and there is no reason to actually like the main characters. There is no soul to any of it.”

There was one aspect even the show’s biggest haters seemed to agree on: The Rings of Power looks amazing. “Stunningly beautiful world,” wrote a reviewer. “Sadly, was bored out of my mind.”

[THR]

The only thing I did see with regard to this mess was a preview (watch below) that someone posted on Twitter. At first I thought it had to be a joke, but it’s actually real? Good God:

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