With the release of "Ironheart" on Disney+, another round of the ol' "review bombing" is taking place.
Review bombing is when people rush to sites like Rotten Tomatoes to crush the reputation of a television show or movie, give it bad reviews, and warn people away from giving it any watch hours or box office bank.
The thing is, these bombs are often deserved, though if I'm being honest, not all of these bad reviews are come by honestly.
As That Park Place noted in its article about the review bombing that "Ironheart" received, many of the reviews had appeared on Rotten Tomatoes before the show was even released, sparking something of a culture war front where defenders of Disney's DEI-heavy offerings begin accusing everyone else of social sins, including those who actually do judge the show negatively legtimately:
Ironheart’s Rotten Tomatoes audience score jumped from 32% to nearly 70% before quickly falling off again and hitting around 60% as of this writing. But that doesn’t mean viewers suddenly started enjoying it.
Over on IMDb, the show currently sits at 4.3/10, with the majority of ratings being either 1-star or 10-star. Middling, honest reviews are almost nonexistent. This isn’t a balanced audience weighing in—it’s a tug-of-war between extremes. The result? Artificial inflation in the name of “justice.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this narrative play out. The moment a Disney project underperforms with general audiences—particularly if the lead character is a woman or person of color—the media reflexively shouts review bombing. It happened with The Acolyte, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel, and now Ironheart.
Does this mean the show isn't as bad as the culture war is letting on? Perhaps the show is actually kind of middling and isn't everything that either side is making it out to be?
Not likely. According to many a report from various culture critics, "Ironheart" is full of Disney's worst bad habits, and seems to be written during a time when those bad habits were in full swing. As noted by the Nerdrotic YouTube channel, they tried to keep this show buried for a while, and now we know why. The show is just awful, pays no respect at all to the heroes that established it, and relies on all the left's favorite storytelling tropes, including white man weak/bad, people of color good/strong, women good/strong, total remakes of established characters into something totally different, and they even threw in some lesbians, a "Gay I" assistant, and a transgender character who cannot act to save they/them's life.
The entire show seems to be there to scratch the itches of leftist activists, and that's about it. The rumors about it, the leaks, the previews, all informed many of these people that this was going to be another Disney failure were true, and they did what people do.
Does this make the review bombing before the show ever comes out, right? No... and yes.
While a lot of these reviews were bad faith, that bad faith wasn't generated in a vacuum. Disney used to be an empire of creativity and innovation. It was celebrated the world over. Now the very people who used to wait in line for the latest Disney release, gave a lot of their time and effort to supporting this franchise, or that fandom, are now being accused of all sorts of social sins by the very company they supported.
Disney, and companies like it, wagged their fingers in the faces of people from a position of socio-political ignorance, attempting to make those who were just there to have a good time and sink themselves into their favorite corner of the escapist landscape feel as if they'd done something wrong by being a fan.
People think this is about "Ironheart." This is actually about a culture of ungratefulness, self-aggrandizement, and pseudo-moral virtue signaling that's infected Hollywood to the point where it sees its platform of entertainment as a soapbox to preach on. No one's here for that, no one wants it, but they're forcing it on whoever they can by infecting everything that people love.
They're review bombing "Ironheart," but they're review bombing Disney just as much, if not more, and that should be paid attention to. This is the rejection of bad faith creations by a corporation — or rather an industry — that has turned on its customers while still wanting them to consume its product.
In that instance, the review bombing is very legitimate. It's a rebuke of a destructive culture that thinks of itself as progressive and holier-than-thou.
