Do you ever get the impression when you look at the Danish media’s reviews of home-produced films that there is any fishing?
Somehow they always end up getting 5/6, often while foreign films with universal recognition, like ‘Promising Young Woman’ recently, only get 4/6 without a single hint as to why they lost two stars.
Well, get up and take a bow, Daniel Bentien.
Breaded by critics, praised by the public
Bentien is the editor of kino.dk, the largest place in Denmark to find out what’s new in the cinema and buy tickets, and too late he has become worried about the high scores of Denmark’s ‘summer films’.
‘Marco Effect’ is the latest Department Q film, albeit with a completely different lineup as the investigative detectives, but despite a pan of critics, the film had an honorable 4.9 / 6 on the Cinema side – a score that influence many to go.
But is the score deserved? Not according to Bentien.
Hundreds and hundreds
A survey conducted by Ekko film magazine from user ratings of the film revealed that an awful lot of them were six star numbers left by first-time Cinema reviewers.
As many as 910 reviews were left in the first five days of its release – impressive considering that the last Q-Film Department, ‘Journal 64’ has since its premiere in 2018 received only 1,193 Cinema ratings.
Following its premiere on May 27, about 16 months after the planned release, it sold 71,007 tickets over the opening weekend after some pretty bad reviews from critics.
Impossible to know who is responsible
Most of the high points were left by anonymous users. In contrast, most of the low scores came with comments criticizing the filmโs slow pace and all-round quality.
โIt ended up being a manual task to sort through. It was done in a rather cunning way, as the IP address had been bypassed, so it looked as if the reviews came from different places, “Bentien revealed to TV2.
“It’s impossible to say who’s behind it.”
The average score for ratings with comments, according to the Ekko analysis, was 1.7 – 3.2 lower than the overall score. ‘Druk’, on the other hand, scored 5.3, only 0.1 below the overall average.
Now a three-star movie
Bentien told Ekko that he “would delete ratings that look suspicious”, and this decision has revised the result to 2.8 / 6.
“The core of the case is that there has been cheating with the reviews,” he told TV2.
“If this was a one-time thing, I could live with it. I can not if it happens several times. โ
The film’s producer Nordisk Film denies any involvement. “It is completely unacceptable for anyone to manipulate this,” it said.
Source: The Nordic Page