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'The Little Mermaid' The Victim of Racist Review Bombing

Source: Courtesy of Disney / Disney / The Little Mermaid

No surprise, haters are big mad that the live action version of The Little Mermaid, mainly because the Disney Princess Ariel is a Black woman, and are review-bombing the film. 

After Disney’s latest live-action film, The Little Mermaid, became the latest target of an “unusual” influx of negative reviews from users with multiple accounts or who use bots, aka review-bombing, International Movie Data Base (IMDb) had to change its rating system, Variety reports. 

The Little Mermaid got over 41,000 user ratings on the website earning an overall positive 7.0 (weighted) average score, but the website points out that more than 39% of the ratings are 1-star, the lowest rating a movie can get on IMDb.

In response to the “unusual activity,” IMDb added a notification saying the “rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title. To preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied.”

The Little Mermaid is not the first time IMDb has taken such steps for a film.

You don’t have to be a movie expert or rocket science to figure out why this film is the victim of such hate. Since Halle Bailey took on the role to become Ariel, bringing the fictional character to the big screen in live-action glory, the racist fallout was loud and obvious.

Speaking with Variety, Bailey told the website her family rallied behind her when the racist hashtag #NotMyAriel trended on Twitter.

Bailey’s The Little Mermaid Is Winning At The Box Office

Regardless, Bailey has plenty to be proud of. The film made a big splash at the weekend box office bringing in an estimated $163.5 million, according to Deadline, and $209 million globally.

It’s already the best of Disney’s live-action adaptions of the company’s classics, besting out her mentor, Beyoncé, and Donald Glover, in The Lion King and Aladdin.

Haters will hate, but they will have to deal because Halle Bailey is our Black mermaid princess Ariel forever.

Photo: Courtesy of Disney / Disney

Haters Are Review Bombing ‘The Little Mermaid’ & It’s Pretty Obvious Why  was originally published on cassiuslife.com