The Acolyte becomes lowest-rated Star Wars project after ‘review bombing’

The Acolyte has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score of any show or film in the Star Warsfranchise after receiving a slew of negative reviews by trolls.

The new series currently has a 14 per cent audience score – an even lower rating than the critically panned Star Wars: The Clone Wars 2008 film’s 19 per cent, and the notorious 1978 Star Wars: Holiday Special’s 25 per cent.

The show also has a low IMDb rating of 3.5 stars; 56 per cent of users gave it one star. These low scores are likely down to review bombing –it’s been highigted by fans that the show’s Rotten Tomatoes audience score started off as 50 per cent on 5 June, before rapidly plummeting over the last fortnight.

The Acolyte stars the Black actor Amandla Stenberg (The Hate U Give, Bodies Bodies Bodies) as twin Force users on opposite sides of a war. Last week’s episode, “Destiny”, included a romantic moment between two female witches.

However, some trolls appear to have got confused about which project to target. A similarly named, but entirely unrelated, 2008 horror film called Acolytes has been bombarded with negative reviews.

Sinece the release of The Acolyte, Acolytes’s audience score has suddenly dropped from 42 per cent to 33 per cent.

This is not the first time that fans have been mobilised to leave negative reviews for a franchise instalment with more progressive content. Thirty per cent of the IMDb ratings of the current series of Doctor Who, starring Ncuti Gatwa, are one star.

According to Deadline, the 2023 live action remake of The Little Mermaid’s Moviepilot score dipped to a 0.7 out of 10 rating. IMDb put a warning on the movie’s page reading, “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title”. The website changed the way that its star ratings were calculated for this film.

Before the first female-led Marvel movie Captain Marvel opened in cinemas in 2019, trolls review bombed it to the extent that its Rotten Tomatoes “Want to See” score fell to 28 per cent. Rotten Tomatoes then changed their website so that audiences couldn’t submit reviews until a film or show came out.