Aamir Khan’s Laal Singh Chaddha being review-bombed on IMDb, scores 4.2/10 rating

Laal Singh Chaddha, the Hindi remake of the Hollywood classic Forrest Gump, was released in theatres on Thursday on the back of sustained boycott campaigns against it. Both Aamir and his co-star Kareena Kapoor Khan have asked the audience to give the film a chance.

But early box office reports don’t paint a positive picture. The film — produced on a hefty budget and filmed over three years — made Rs 10.7 crore on day one of release, as per early estimates, claiming the top spot but failing to outperform Aamir’s previous release, Thugs of Hindostan. Reviews have also been less-than-positive. The Indian Express’ Shubhra Gupta wrote that it picks up the pace towards the end, but criticised Aamir’s central performance.

The most recent example of review-bombing on IMDb was the Disney+ series Ms Marvel. IMDb’s official position on rating manipulation is as follows: “There is no foolproof way to verify that users have actually seen the movie that they are voting for, or that the vote that they are casting is what they really think about it. We depend on and expect our users to be truthful and only vote on those movies that they have personally seen. We are aware that there are people who may vote for the sole purpose of trying to lower the rating for a movie (this happens both ways — there are just as many people who try to inflate a vote). We have several safeguards in place to automatically detect and defeat this type of ballot stuffing: even though we count and display all unaltered votes in the rating breakdown, we apply several countermeasures against all attempts to skew the rating and the weighted rating you see displayed on the site already takes all of the above into consideration.”