Good news for MoviePass, the might-be-to-good-to-be-true company that lets you see unlimited movies for a monthly fee: It is still alive.
Bad news for MoviePass: Gotti.
That’s “Gotti,” the new John Travolta film about mob boss John Gotti. It debuted this week, and appears to be one of the worst movies of the year.
It was also supposed to be one of the things that kept MoviePass alive.
That’s because MoviePass invested in “Gotti” earlier this year, as part of its new MoviePass Ventures unit, which takes equity stakes in movies. The idea is that MoviePass can help make those movies a hit, by promoting them to its users, and can share in the upside when that happens.
“‘Gotti’ is precisely the type of film we established MoviePass Ventures to support,” MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe press released at the time it announced the deal.
But it sure doesn’t look there’s any upside to “Gotti,” which stars John Travolta, and was directed by Kevin Connolly, who you know as the guy who played “E” on “Entourage.” It appears to be astonishingly bad, at least according to people who are paid to review movies for a living. It’s currently sitting at 0 percent at Rotten Tomatoes.
Some highlights of the lowlights:
“A dismal mess”, says the New York Times. Its “shabby aesthetic and narrative shortcomings are outweighed by its more drastically questionable moral ones,” says the Guardian. “It’s not a good movie,” Entertainment Weekly TLDRs. “The worst mob movie of all time,” rules the New York Post. More if you want to keep going, here.
The good news for MoviePass is that “Gotti” is the company’s second movie investment. “American Animals,” MoviePass’s first stab at this, came out earlier this month, to positive reviews. But there are very decent odds you haven’t heard about it — it’s in a few dozen theaters and has grossed $544,426 over two weeks.
More positive news for MoviePass, which loses money every time you see a movie using the service, but hopes to eventually get enough scale to somehow fix that: It is now up to 3 million subscribers, up 2x from the beginning of the year.
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