Rotten Tomatoes Assures “No Bot Manipulation” With ‘Melania’s Audience Score, Not Everyone Is Convinced

With a stark disparity between Melania‘s critic and audience scores, Rotten Tomatoes is denying any bot interference.

Despite speculation of rigged box office number, the movie review hub recently declared that its “Popcornmeter” score for the documentary about first lady Melania Trump is driven only by reviews from verified audience members who “have bought a ticket to the film.”

“There has been NO bot manipulation on the audience reviews for the Melania documentary,” a spokesperson for the site said in a statement shared with People. “Reviews displayed on the Popcornmeter are VERIFIED reviews, meaning it has been verified that users have bought a ticket to the film.”

As Melania falls -67% in its second weekend at the box office for a 10-day total of $14.5M, against its $40M licensing and $35M marketing budget, not everyone is so convinced.

“The ‘verified’ Rotten Tomatoes audience reviews for the Melania doc all come from new accounts that have never posted before.  Who is paying for these bots?” wrote one person on X.

“So I went into Rotten Tomatoes to see the reviews of the Melania movie dreck.  It seems that all of the Verified Reviews, which were all r star reviews were from people who: 1) never had another single review in the account review history 2) all of these people bought their tickets off of Fandango,” someone else noted.

“They’re calling Melania the most botted rotten tomatoes audience ‘reviewed’ movies of all time,” another posted.

Noting the film’s then 5% “Tomatometer” score earlier this week, Jimmy Kimmel previously said on his talk show, “That is very low. To put that in perspective, that is 1% lower than Gigli. But that’s just what the loser and hater critics had to say. The audience score for Melania is 99% positive, which is 1% higher than The Godfather.

“And I’m sure Donald J. Corleone had nothing to do with that at all,” added Kimmel. “We need to get to the bottom of this! Send in Tulsi Gabbard and the FBI. Seize the ticket machines, the popcorn buckets, the box office receipts at every multiplex in America!”

Earlier in the monologue, he noted reports of bulk ticket purchases boosting numbers, distributing them for free with Republican activists and senior citizen homes.

“And if you don’t believe this is the kind of thing they would do, you may be forgetting that back in 2019, the Republican National Committee bought $100,000 worth of Don Jr.’s book to put in swag bags, to make it a New York Times bestseller,” he recalled. “Don Jr.’s book debuted No. 1 on the New York Times‘ bestseller list, despite the fact that no one has ever read it. No one has ever even opened that book. It might be filled with blank pages, we will never know.”

As of Sunday, Melania holds an 8% critic score and a 99% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.