Angry 'Star Wars' fans claim they maliciously drove down the audience score for 'The Last Jedi' on a major review site

Warning: Minor spoilers ahead for "Star Wars: The Last Jedi." 

"Star Wars: The Last Jedi" is shaping up to be one of the most divisive "Star Wars" movies of all time, but there might be more to the controversy than simple fandom disagreements.

"The Last Jedi" currently has a 93% favorable score on Rotten Tomatoes from critics — but sits with only 56% of the audience's approval. That gap is noticeably large, and could be due to an intentional trolling campaign.

As Deadline noted on Sunday, "The Last Jedi" received an A from Cinema Score. Since CinemaScore tracks reviews from audiences as they literally exit the theaters, it's a much more scientific form of polling. But on Rotten Tomatoes, the system is much more vulnerable to troll campaigns.

"Anyone can log into these sites several times (anecdotally we played around with this last night) and weigh down the audience grades against a movie," Deadline's Anthony D'Alessandro reported. "The consensus from non-Disney sources this morning is that 'trolling' occurred here in regards to the online reaction to 'Last Jedi.'"

One source of the "trolling" in question might have been from a Facebook page dedicated to taking down "Disney's Treatment of Franchises and Its Fanboys." The page has around 200 followers.

"Thanks to friends of mine who taught me a thing or two about Bot Accounts, I used them to create this audience score through Facebook accounts created that subsequently logged into Rotten Tomatoes who rigged this score and still keep it dropping," a Sunday morning post reads.

After Bleeding Cool and Vanity Fair reported on the claim made through this Facebook account, the user posted more assertions about the bot-use.

"I actually did use Bots,"one post said.

"Yes, it is that easy to manipulate Rotten Tomatoes and thus influence the mindless sheep out there,"another said. "Give me a holla if a big second week drop happens!"

Rotten Tomatoes didn't respond to INSIDER's request for comment. But we did some exploring on Rotten Tomatoes after Bleeding Cool reported seeing some "The Last Jedi" reviews cropping up under "The Shape of Water."

Not only did we also see negative reviews for "The Last Jedi" under "The Shape of Water," but there was one under "Downsizing" as well.

"The Last Jedi" reviews appearing under audience scores for other movies could be the sign of a bot gone wrong, though there's no current way of proving that this is the case. 

Regardless of the disparate score on Rotten Tomatoes, "The Last Jedi" will certainly remain a divisive movie. A tiny set of fans are even running a Change.org petition to remove the movie from the "Star Wars" canon.

Director Rian Johnson was deliberate in his scorched-earth approach to this "Star Wars" chapter. He helped reset many aspects of the universe and expanded others beyond what fans were expecting.

Several questions set up by "The Force Awakens" were discarded without a big reveal. Other reveals (like Rey's parentage) subverted expected tropes — a choice sure to leave many fans feeling underwhelmed.

For more on "The Last Jedi," read our breakdown of 21 major questions we have going into the final installment of this "Star Wars" trilogy.

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