1 Message

 • 

70 Points

Sunday, October 26th, 2025

Solved

Suspicious rating drop on Helloween (2025) - possible review-bombing

Hi IMDb Team and Community, I've noticed a sharp and unusual rating drop on the independent film Helloween (2025) over the past couple of days. The average rating has fallen from around 8.4 stars to 6.2 stars, even though the total votes only increased from just under 1,100 to 1,248. The film was released on 5th September 2025, and it has taken around seven weeks to build up to nearly 1,100 ratings. So an increase of about 150 votes in just two days, combined with such a steep drop in the average rating, seems quite unusual. At the same time, there's been a sudden influx of low-star reviews that were quickly up-voted, while earlier positive reviews have been heavily down-voted. Given that this is a small independent release right before Halloween, this pattern looks suspiciously like coordinated review-bombing, which could unfairly affect the film's visibility and reputation. Could the IMDb voting team please check whether there's been any unusual voting activity on this title? Thanks very much for your time, Phil.

Oldest First
Selected Oldest First

Employee

 • 

5.9K Messages

 • 

62.3K Points

1 month ago

Hi grimpino- Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We are aware that there are people who may vote for the sole purpose of trying to inflate/deflate the rating for a movie. We have several safeguards in place to automatically detect and defeat this type of ballot stuffing: even though we count and display all unaltered votes in the rating breakdown, we apply several countermeasures against all attempts to skew the rating for the weighted rating you see displayed on the site. We will review the title in question to ensure that the weighted average is displaying as intended. For more information on our abuse detection methods, or details about IMDb ratings and weighted averages, please refer to our Ratings FAQs: https://help.imdb.com/article/imdb/track-movies-tv/ratings-faq/G67Y87TFYYP6TWAV Cheers!