The marketing team behind John Travolta’s new film “Gotti” are making the claim that you should not trust critics when it comes to their universally panned movie. A new ad is telling audiences to, quite literally, distrust the critics, or, as they are called in the below ad, the “trolls behind a keyboard.” You see, “Gotti” has a 0% rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes and is dying a very slow death at the box-office. So what does the marketing team behind "Gotti" believe should be done for optimal damage control? Well, how about trash film journalism as a whole. Hell, they even seem to be indicating that a conspiracy might be going on behind these negative reviews. Yikes.
The film earned a tepid $1.7 million on its opening weekend, 40% of that reported gross coming from MoviePass subscribers. Oh and, by the way, MoviePass actually distributed the film. I haven't seen the film, but plan to eventually, but “Gotti” has been described by critics as “terrible,” “laughable,” “a mess,” “a shitshow,” among other terms.
To make matters worse, Dan Murrel of ScreenJunkies is reporting on Twitter about something very suspicious going on with "Gotti," again, on Rotten Tomatoes.
As mentioned, Gotti's 0% RT rating isn't good, but it does have a really good 77% audience score; Based on over 6900 user reviews, which, truth be told, is a suspicious number given that the movie opened to only 500 screens this past weekend and severely bombed with just a $1.7M opening weekend.
The 6900 reviews also feel a little "off" because successful blockbusters such as "Incredibles 2" and "Oceans 8" have around the same amount of user reviews. And so, a user on Reddit went on a little hunt for the truth and found out that of the first 58 user reviews "Gotti" received on RT, all with an available profile, 45 had created their account in June of 2018. Oh, boy.
Things only became sketchier as we dug deeper, because out of these 45 reviewers, 32 only reviewed "Gotti," 10 reviewed Gotti plus another movie (7 times it was "American Animals," for some reason). Of the remaining 13 accounts, 8 looked normal and 5 had created their accounts in December, so those were probably real reviews, and, funnily enough, almost all of them were negative reactions of the film.
Credit must go to Twitter's @MurrelDan for uncovering the dirt.
Okay, I’ll just come out and say it. Some party involved with Gotti artificially manipulated the audience scores and they’re now using it as a marketing strategy. The numbers don’t make sense. Even if that weren’t true, this is a divisive & desperate way to sell a film. https://t.co/Q5jznjNRSx— Dan Murrell (@MurrellDan) June 19, 2018