Those who use Rotten Tomatoes to get a sense of whether a movie is worth seeing know to check two ratings: the critics' score and the audience score. The new Melania documentary has just set a record in the gap between the two. Critics hate it, with the cumulative score based on 46 reviews at a rock-bottom favorable rating of 7%. Audiences, on the other hand, give it a 99% favorable rating based on more than 1,000 responses. No other movie has had a difference so large, reports Rolling Stone.
Rotten Tomatoes says the numbers are legit: its audience metric counts only "verified" users who purchased tickets through Fandango. "There has been NO bot manipulation on the audience reviews for the Melania documentary," a spokesperson says. "Reviews displayed on the Popcornmeter are VERIFIED reviews, meaning it has been verified that users have bought a ticket to the film." Similar right-leaning fare has shown big divides—including Dennis Quaid's Reagan (18% critics, 98% audience) and the Daily Wire's Am I Racist? (56% vs. 96%).
Still, "something suspicious" seems to be going on, the site Debunk.org tells Newsweek. It examined the results and declared that the sky-high rating is "statistically impossible to achieve." The suggestions of-number-cooking goes both ways: Over on IMDb, the movie site put up a notice of "unusual activity" on its results after more than 44,000 reviews poured in, the vast majority of them doling out only one star. (The Guardian's review is an example of the scathing view of critics.)