Rotten Tomatoes' parent company has officially denied that the audience score for the documentary film "Melania" was artificially inflated, calling the near-perfect 99% audience rating the product of verified ticket purchases — not bots, not bulk buys, not some shadowy Republican operation funneling grandma to the cineplex.

The denial came after a predictable wave of disbelief from corners of the media and entertainment world that simply could not accept the numbers. As reported by Fox News, the film, which chronicles the 20 days leading up to President Donald Trump's second inauguration, earned a 6% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes alongside that 99% audience rating — a gap of more than 93 percentage points and one of the largest in the platform's history.

Versant, Rotten Tomatoes' parent company, told Variety plainly:

"Reviews displayed on the Popcornmeter are VERIFIED reviews, meaning it has been verified that users have bought a ticket to the film."

No bot manipulation. Verified purchases. The audience showed up, paid money, watched the film, and loved it. That's the story. Everything else is okay.

The Left's Favorite Conspiracy: Regular People Can't Possibly Like This

The pattern here is so familiar it barely needs narrating. A cultural product associated with someone the left despises performs well, and immediately, the machinery spins up to explain it away. Not "the audience connected with the material." Not "maybe critics are out of touch." The first instinct is fraud.

Jimmy Kimmel devoted part of his Wednesday monologue to the cause:

"A lot of people, myself included, have been wondering how this movie managed to sell $7 million worth of tickets last weekend when almost every theater seemed to be empty leading up to the release."

He then speculated — without evidence — that tickets were purchased and distributed to Republican activists and senior citizens' homes. He called it "rigged." The audience laughed. Late-night hosts and their audiences always laugh at the things they want to be true.

But here's what Kimmel's monologue actually revealed: the discomfort wasn't about suspicious data. It was about what the data meant. A documentary about Melania Trump pulled in more than $7.1 million on its opening weekend — one of the strongest performances ever for a non-music documentary — and the people who bought tickets overwhelmingly rated it positively. That reality is intolerable to a class of people who have spent years insisting that the Trumps are universally loathed outside a narrow, deplorable fringe.

The 93-point gap between critics and audiences isn't evidence of manipulation. It's a measurement of a cultural disconnect that has been widening for years.

The IMDb Wrinkle Nobody Wants to Discuss

While the media fixated on whether the Rotten Tomatoes audience score was inflated, a far more interesting anomaly sat in plain sight on another platform. Over on IMDb, the film had logged more than 48,200 user ratings since its release — and carried a 1.3-star rating, with most votes landing at one star.

IMDb itself flagged the issue, posting a warning under the film's title:

"Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title."

So let's line this up. On the platform where ratings are tied to verified ticket purchases, the film sits at 99%. On the platform where anyone with an account can rate a film they've never seen, it sits at 1.3 stars — so low that the platform's own algorithm flagged it as suspicious.

One of these numbers reflects people who actually watched the movie. The other reflects a digital mob with a political agenda. The media chose to investigate the wrong one.

The real review-bombing

This is the part the conspiracy theorists don't want to engage with. If you're genuinely concerned about artificial manipulation of audience scores, IMDb just handed you a smoking gun — and it points in the opposite direction from where Kimmel was looking. A 1.3-star average with "unusual voting activity" detected by the platform itself is what actual score manipulation looks like. But that story doesn't serve the narrative, so it barely registers.

$75 Million Says Amazon Believed in the Market

Amazon MGM Studios reportedly paid $40 million for the project and spent an additional $35 million on marketing — a $75 million bet that there was a massive audience hungry for this film. The opening weekend returns suggest they were right to make it.

This is worth noting because it cuts against the comfortable fiction that pro-Trump cultural products are niche curiosities. Studios don't spend $75 million on a niche. They spend that kind of money when they see a market that other studios are too ideologically squeamish to serve. Hollywood has spent years leaving money on the table by refusing to make content that appeals to half the country. Amazon picked it up.

A 93-Point Mirror

The critics who gave "Melania" a 6% score aren't hiding their reasoning. This is a profession that has become remarkably uniform in its political orientation, and the gap between what professional critics endorse and what paying audiences enjoy has been growing across genres, not just political documentaries. The Melania film simply made that gap impossible to ignore.

The instinct to cry "rigged" rather than reckon with the disconnect tells you everything. When your audience disagrees with you by 93 points, the problem isn't the audience. When the platform confirms the scores are verified, and you still reach for conspiracy, you've stopped doing criticism and started doing activism.

Melania Trump's documentary sold millions in tickets, earned a near-perfect audience score on verified reviews, and drove her critics to accuse regular moviegoers of being either bots or pawns. The 93-point gap isn't between critics and audiences. It's between the people who watch things and the people who tell you what to think about them.