Ratings Terrorism?

Yeah, that’s a new one.

Unusual description for bad foreign reviews of the new Little Mermaid, wouldn’t you say?

Now if you are Disney it’s a perfectly understandable one. Disney Studios was banking big on this film being a hit of Aladdin and Lion King levels. Instead, it’s going to lose money. The foreign box office is absolutely dead for this thing.

The Lion King and Aladdin were more or less faithful adaptations of classic, hand-drawn animated films from Disney’s 1990s Renaissance period. The Little Mermaid’s problem is that it wasn’t particularly faithful. It was way too long for children’s entertainment and worse still had been twigged, twanged, and twisted to tell the original story through a modern California lens.

This more “corrected” version of a modern romance was more comfortable for a modern California film company but foreign audiences haven’t kept up with the latest trends in Left Coast sanity and their film critics reflected those tastes. Disney was shrieking “review bombing” but instead of it being average Americans who didn’t like the swill* they were dishing out and posting one-star, one-paragraph reviews on aggregator sites. It was mainstream professional, foreign critics slamming it.

Of course, to Disney, it’s the same thing.

So where did “ratings terrorism” come from?

Well, basically translation software. A South Korean newspaper had written a story about Disney’s claims of “review bombing.” The problem was the ROKs don’t really have a one to one-word concept for it. Google translated the Korean words to English as Ratings Terrorism. A concept Disney was comfortable with given how badly they were counting on the FBO to win the day for them.

Okay, I’m done here.

*We didn’t like it either, it’s obviously been “fortified.”