Abstract The Internet has significant impacts on consumer perceptions and their choices of products and services. Consequently, management is often tempted to intervene with online reviews. In the original study ( Ma et al., 2019 ), we explored the dynamic patterns of review manipulation and its impact on box office revenue over the movie product-life cycle. In this research commentary, we discuss why it is difficult to separate promotional reviews from authentic consumer reviews and what we can expect in this stream of research in the future.