Amazon Prime Puts 72-Hour Moratorium On Reviews Posted To Its Site

Amazon Prime’s new series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, is set 1,000 years before the famous Peter Jackson-directed films, whose last edition came out 19 years ago, and eight years after the concluding film of The Hobbit trilogy.

So what’s a 72-hour delay in reviewing the new series? That’s the stance taken by Amazon Prime, which has phased in a new policy of holding off on reviews of its original content from its users until three days have passed.

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Skeptics believe that it may be a tactic to stop the bleeding on The Rings of Power, since some initial reviews were, shall we say, less than kind.

Officially, Amazon has no comment on the new policy. But sources have confirmed its institution, and claim it predates the new Lord of the Rings series. According to a person familiar with the updated handling of the reviews, the 72-hour waiting period was phased in earlier this summer, but not specifically around the launch of any one title.

Instead, it was aimed at minimizing trolling or offensive review content as well as authenticating the comments are from actual viewers. (The book side of Amazon, the foundation of the company, has also contended with these kinds of “review-bombing” issues over the years.)

A League of Their Own, the episodic reboot of the Penny Marshall baseball movie, was the first title to reflect the update.

Critics reviews, save a scathing piece in the UK Daily Mail, have generally been positive for The Rings of Power, as measured by aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic.

But customer reviews have been disproportionately negative, as many purists have resented the deviations from J.R.R. Tolkien’s canon in the new series.

Like Netflix, Prime Video has phased out its starred, on-screen reviews. The recently revamped Prime Video user interface includes user ratings from IMDb on every film or series title. As of Friday evening, the IMDb rating stood at a respectable 7.1 out of 10, an improvement over where it had been just 24 hours earlier.

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