'Gotti' fires back at critics after low Rotten Tomatoes score

Gotti

This is actually kind of nuts.

Gotti may have a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, but they’re determined to not go down without a fight (or whatever they want to call this nonsense).

The John Travolta lead biopic debuted last week not only to terrible reviews but also to a terrible box-office — as it came in 11th place and only made around $1.7 million from 503 screens domestically.

The filmmakers aren’t happy about it (which is understandable, no studio is ever happy when a movie bombs). Instead of dealing with it rationally or admitting they made a bad movie, though, they’ve decided to blame Rotten Tomatoes and film critics in general.

The Gotti marketing campaign took to Twitter to deliver the following message:

“Audiences loved Gotti but critics don’t want you to see it… The question is why??? Trust the people and see it for yourself” it reads.

This falls underneath a TV Promo which contains a title card that reads “Audiences loved Gotti. Critics put out the hit. Who would you trust more? Yourself or a troll behind a keyboard”

It's kind of funny how all of us film critics are out there are trolls behind a keyboard when the ad itself doesn’t even contain proper grammar. There definitely should be a question mark at the end of that last phrase.

Later on, then, they had the audacity to release a tweet with an actual quote from the Chicago Sun Times. I guess critics are only trolls when they don't like your shitty movie?

The real head-scratcher is what they mean by “audiences loved Gotti.” To their credit, the film had a 75% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes earlier today which, at the time of this article’s posting, has fallen to a 67%.

That’s where MoviePass comes into this. The subscription company, who partly funded the production of Gotti, contributed to 40 percent of the movie’s box office earnings during its opening weekend.

MoviePass themselves, in fact, sent out the ‘Audiences love Gotti…” notification earlier today to all their mobile subscribers.

Which has led to the internet asking the next logical question: Is MoviePass somehow manipulating/sabotaging the scores? Given that nobody seemed to really care about Gotti in the first place, people have begun to speculate whether they’ve purposefully been giving their film all positive marks throughout different platforms.

Given that the audience score has fallen 8 percent today — especially when compared to its 4.9 user rating on IMDB and 4.4 on Metacritic — it certainly seems possible.

Another theory with a bit of weight behind it has to do with the Scientology Community. Some are claiming, due to John Travolta's links to Scientology, that the whole community decided to help out with boosting the rating. There's no factual evidence or anything like that at this time, but it just adds another shade of gray to this whole situation.

Rotten Tomatoes later came out with a statement via Entertainment Weekly saying that this wasn’t true. “We closely monitor our platforms and haven’t determined there to be any problems,” it reads. “All of the reviews were left by active accounts.”

To clarify, I’m not placing any blame on Rotten Tomatoes in this situation. I believe that they actually did investigate the situation and I believe that the scores were indeed left by active accounts.

Given that hardly anyone even saw Gotti in the first place though, it’s not impossible that the film/Moviepass bombarded the Rotten Tomatoes audience score with all positive reviews from real people — which makes total sense because anyone and everyone can rate movies on this audience score.

It’s fishy, to say the least. What’s really ironic is the fact that none of this actually makes me want to see Gotti. Even if these headlines are interesting and generating some more press for the film, Gotti still looks like a terribly made feature-film.

Watch the trailer here to decide for yourself. But, be warned, if you don’t like what you see, there’s a good chance the Gotti marketing campaign will come after you next.

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