The Little Mermaid starring Halle Bailey is off to a good run after opening at the box office over the weekend. In its three-day opening, the Disney film brought in $95.5 million with a four-day projection of $117.5 million.
Globally, the film’s debut snatched around $163 million. Although the numbers didn’t peak to what film critics predicted, the numbers were decent enough to garner critical acclaim. But some reports suggest that “review-bombing” has come into play in countries including France, Korea and Germany.
On AlloCiné, a French review-aggregation website, web administrators were forced to post advisories when a suspicious amount of negative reviews surplused on the site. Other sites, including IMBd, had to do the same. Rotten Tomatoes, however, reports that the film had a 95% verified audience score.
“We are currently observing an unusual distribution of scores which demands the need for caution,” AlloCiné wrote. “We encourage you to make up your own mind about the film.”
And on IMDd, the warning reads: “Our 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 notes came as the sites began to believe that the negative reviews were being drawn from either internet trolls or bots, according to a Deadline report.
“As we noted in our global preview, The Little Mermaid was expected to be more of a domestic play at the outset,” the publication reported. “However, it’s fairly astonishing to see these overseas reactions — largely believed to be led by internet trolls.”
The report continued: “Some gripes have been about murky lighting or even just the why of it all when remaking a classic. In some pockets of the world, there has sadly been racially-tinged commentary.”
At the time of the movie’s opening, the top five markets were: Mexico, which raked in $8.5 million, the United Kingdom, which brought in $6.3 million, Italy came in third at $4.7 million, followed by Brazil and Australia with $4 million each, according to Deadline.
