Rotten Tomatoes Removes Audience Rating For Star Wars: The Acolyte After Leslye Headland And Media Complain About Review Bombing

Rotten Tomatoes has become a functionally useless website now more than ever, as audiences have been censored from posting what they think about Star Wars: The Acolyte. This is the latest in a long line of controversies for the Disney show headed by former Harvey Weinstein assistant Leslye Headland and another indicator that Disney strongarms review websites and entertainment news outlets to bend to their will.

Star Wars fans hated the Acolyte ever since its two-part premiere on Disney+, where it showed a prequel where Jedi acted like stodgy, rules-obsessed Pharisees in a boring start to the show, which caused audiences to declare Star Wars dead. They followed this up with a third episode of backstory exposition, presenting cringe-worthy scenes of lesbian space witches immaculately conceiving twins through the force while singing songs about "the power of many."

Episode four returned to boredom as the Jedi searched for a Wookie, only for it to end before any action started. In this one, they introduced pronouns to push the LGBTQ agenda further, insulting the intelligence of audiences. Some Star Wars fans enjoyed episode five, which included a nearly fifteen-minute lightsaber battle, but fight scene experts like Shadiversity panned the battle as some of the worst ever produced in the franchise.

The most bizarre episode to date was episode six, where the Sith Qimir stripped naked in front of the show's protagonist, revealing himself to her while having a conversation. With Leslye Headland's Weinstein affiliation, many Star Wars fans wondered why she presented something so rapey within the show.

However, the public relations have perhaps been worse than the show itself. With Headland laughing about it being the "gayest Star Wars ever" while lambasting Star Wars fans and doing the usual victim tour regarding her identity politics, audiences had enough of a reason to turn out. 

Then, however, Amandla Stenberg, the show's lead actress, took to Instagram to put out a crazy video about "discourse" and calling her critics bigots and racists. At this point, many people declared they would never bother with Star Wars again.

The ratings reveal most audiences have given up on the show as well. The initial five-day ratings show a huge drop from Ahsoka, last year's live-action Star Wars offering, and the most recent episode fell out of the top ten of streaming programs for the week it was out.

Nothing's spurred more conversation, though, than audience ratings of the show. The creators have taken to multiple media outlets complaining about "review bombing," as the Acolyte started with a 22% user rotten tomatoes score. The ratings dropped further weekly, however, leveling at a 14% score, the lowest in Star Wars history. Audiences did not like The Acolyte and Headland, and the media's cries about review bombing failed to get any of their supposed modern audiences to chime in with any contrary opinions—largely because such audiences don't exist.

Now, Rotten Tomatoes has bowed to Disney's pressure and removed the show's audience rating from their website. Where once one could see a score of dismal 14% ratings, now it's gone. A user can't even click internally to see what users are thinking because it comes up with a screen that says the user score is "not yet available."

Clearly, Rotten Tomatoes is censoring the public's opinion on this based on the audiences rejecting the show and the site wanting to cover for Disney Star Wars and Leslye Headland's failure. The Acolyte is failing by every measure, even posting a dismal 3.5 out of 10 stars on IMDB, and they're now hoping that if they hide these scores, an audience might change their minds about the show.

It's a bold move, one tried by Netflix, who used to have star ratings for programs on their site, but when reviewers universally panned an Amy Schumer Special, they removed their rating system to cover up for their bad programming.

Rotten Tomatoes only exists to rate shows; however, without this function, they've destroyed the credibility of their website.

What do you think of Rotten Tomatoes removing the audience rating for Star Wars: The Acolyte? Leave a comment and let us know. And make sure to restack this article so more people can see it!