Yesterday, we talked about a new social media ad for John Travolta’s new film “Gotti.” The ad claimed that while critics hated the film (it has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes), audiences have embraced the film. The ad ends with a question asking viewers if they trust themselves more than critics. Well, maybe the answer isn’t as clear-cut as you might imagine. There’s a lot of speculation that the coveted audience score that “Gotti” touts might be a fake.
READ MORE: Latest Ad For ‘Gotti’ Equates Film Critics To “Trolls Behind A Keyboard”
Screen Junkies critic Dan Murrell noticed something strange the other day – those audience scores for “Gotti” were a little fishy. Namely, the sheer number of reviews for the film felt inflated. As of Monday, when the ad came out, “Gotti” had just over 7,000 audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. That doesn’t necessarily seem completely crazy. However, “Gotti” only earned $1.7 million, whereas “Incredibles 2” had just over 7,600 audience reviews and made $180 million. That’s a little eyebrow-raising, to say the least.
However, that’s just one piece of the puzzle. A helpful movie fan on Reddit decided to do a deeper dive on those Rotten Tomatoes user reviews. What they found is pretty alarming:
“I went to take a look at the written reviews on RT, and of the first 58 reviewers with an available profile, 45 had created their account on June 2018;
Out of these 45, 32 have only reviewed Gotti, 10 reviewed Gotti and another movie (7 times it was American Animals [another film owned by MoviePass]) and 3 had more than 3 reviews.
Of the remaining 13 accounts 8 looked normal and 5 had created their account in December (TLJ?) so those were probably legit.”
Now again, this isn’t definitive proof, but it does appear that there are some shenanigans at play. To explain these numbers further, MoviePass, the subscription service that allows users to go to a movie a day for $9.95 a month, has a financial stake in “Gotti.” As part of their “MoviePass Ventures,” “Gotti” and “American Animals” (also named in the stats above) are the first two films that MoviePass has invested in.
And considering a fair number of that sample size reviewed only “Gotti” and “American Animals” (which have no other link than MoviePass), it would appear the subscription service, or at least their marketing team, is perhaps involved in artificially enhancing audience review scores.
If that’s the case, and again, we must stress that none of this is proven fact, this would make sense. MoviePass is at a critical juncture of their business, where everyone is waiting to watch them either fail or revolutionize the film industry. It would definitely be in their best interest to make sure they’re first two distributed films succeed.
The folks over at io9 went a step further and asked for statements from Rotten Tomatoes and MoviePass about these odd stats.
“We closely monitor our platforms and haven’t determined there to be any problems. All of the reviews were left by active accounts,” said Rotten Tomatoes.
“The MoviePass marketing team is only engaged in sending promotional emails and push notifications to our users. We have no further involvement from a marketing perspective and have no insight or information about who is providing the audience reviews to Rotten Tomatoes,” said a statement from MoviePass.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out for future MoviePass films. As of now, “American Animals” has a “Certified Fresh” rating and a high audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.