You only have to look around places like facebook to see how the RT audience scores have been manipulated. Campaigns were started before the film even come out to give it negative reviews. Not just star wars pages either. 99% of the time, RT was the place they aimed for. After the film came out it got even worse. The amount of posts i had to delete on my page where people had posted links to these type of campaigns was astounding. They even added getting people to upvote the prequels on RT to make TLJ score look even worse. Just check out the ROTS reviews and see just how many new ones have suddenly appeared since TLJ.
There’s a real dark side to the Star Wars fandom and it came out in force after TLJ. The amount of the so called reviews and the negative comments/ attacks on social media that point their hatred for it towards the fact that there is more diversity, more women taking the lead roles, Disney is pandering to the SJW’s etc is disgusting. I’ve had it with the fandom.
I’m sure these elements exist, but saying these elements were able to significantly affect audience scores, is an assumption. Like those with unreasonable hatred for this movie, there are also those that would have loved this movie, no matter what, and gave this film 10/10 before even seeing it. What’s the affect of those people on the scores?
Either way I think there’s empirical evidence this has been a very divisive movie. Polls among fans at the TFN board point to 10-15% of fans consider TLJ the best Star Wars film, while 30% consider it the worst. It’s imdb score of 7.4, which is above average, is the worst since AOTC. So, while I personally believe the general audience give TLJ an above average score, the fan base seems to be roughly split down the middle.
I think this is one of those movies, where people generally don’t agree about the movie’s percieved quality for their own valid reasons. It’s become the poster child for why people’s opinions can’t generally be forced into a single average movie score.
This is why I’m so glad sites like these exist, where people are free to passionately express their opinions. I think we’ve seen some great arguments from all sides.