Obviously Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a huge hit. Sometime tonight domestic earnings are expected to hit $220,047,000 plus $230 million foreign for a worldwide haul of $450,047,000, and that’s after three days in theatres.

Obviously everyone wanted to see it this weekend, but what about those shitty “user” (i.e., ticket-buyer) ratings on Rotten Tomatoes (56% with 97,121 respondents) and Metacritic (4.9% out of 10)?

Metacritic user score for The Last Jedi as of Sunday noon.

Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro has asked around and is reporting that while “user scores typically aren’t that far from their critical ratings,” the reason for the huge gap between critical upvotes for Jedi and negative responses from ticket buyers is due to malicious “trolling.” Additionally, he says, “there’s no way to filter on these sites whether or not the users have actually seen Last Jedi or not.”

This is why D’Alessandro trusts CinemaScore and PostTrak much more, as they “literally poll moviegoers in real time, as they’re exiting the theater.”

And yet no other films on the current Rotten Tomatoes roster are showing this kind of discrepancy — a 93% critical rating for Jedi vs. 56% user ratings from 96,829 respondents.

Ferdinand has a 73% rating and a 75% user rating. Justice League, generally regarded as a box-office underperformer, is at $40% (critics) and 79% (some very friendly users). Wonder is at 85% (critics) and 91% (users). The Disaster Artist is at 99% and 90%. Coco is at 97% and 96%.

In short, the only film beside Jedi with a serious critic-user discrepancy is Justice League, but in that case the film was much better liked by users than critics. In all other cases user and critic ratings are fairly close. If you buy D’Alessandro’s rationale The Last Jedi is the only film playing that inspired trollers (who may or many not have seen it…who knows?) to register their negative reactions in a significant way.

Again, out of 97,121 respondents 56% — roughly 54,387 — delivered a negative vote. 42,733 users gave Rian Johnson‘s film an upvote.

Presumably D’Alessandro isn’t suggesting that all of the negative voters are trollers. Is he thinking….what, maybe half are? If so, that would mean 27,193 Rotten Tomatoes visitors down-voted The Last Jedi out of pure mischief, and another 27,193 voted negatively after actually seeing the film. That’s still a significant negative vote compared to the 42,733 who voted thumbs-up. That’s roughly 63% positive, 37% negative.

Wells to HE community: Do you believe D’Alessandro’s assessment? Is it likely or reasonable that a huge number of negative-minded trolls would bombard The Last Jedi only on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic while going easy or agreeing with critics on every other film out there?

I realize that Star Wars is a special, 40 year-old brand and that it’s always ignited strong feelings, but would it really bring out a huge army of fakers?