Something strange is happening with “The Promise” on IMDb. As of right now, 50.8% (65.6k) of all reviews for Terry George‘s film about the Armenian Genocide give it a 10/10, while 47.8% (61.7k) of all reviews stand at 1/10. Even among the IMDb user ratings, which are notoriously reactive and negatively skewed, it seems absolutely unfathomable that only 1.4% of all viewers would give it a review between 2/10 and 9/10. Either this really is the most divisive movie of all time or something odd is happening behind the scenes.
READ MORE: Christian Bale & Oscar Isaac Can’t Escape The Soap Opera-y ‘The Promise’ [Review]
If you ask George, he’ll tell you it’s the latter. In a press conference held this morning, George and producer Eric Esrailian both addressed the controversy surrounding their film, including the possibility that the majority of the bad reviews are coming from genocide deniers. As Wired noted last September, “The Promise” received nearly 40,000 negative reviews within days of having its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. This has created a battle for the truth that is, oddly, playing out in the scoring system of a single film. Here’s what George had to say:
It can’t have been 50,000 individuals decided after we had two screenings in Toronto to give us 1 out of 10. It seems like a miraculously spontaneous thing to happen, so I definitely think that was a bot or series of bots to give us that vote. Then we had the counter reaction from — which I genuinely think was 25,000 individual votes from the Armenian community who then voted 10 out of 10. It brought in the whole question of IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes — the whole question of manipulating the internet reviews and people being swayed by that.
READ MORE: Christian Bale & Oscar Isaac Fight For Love Amidst War In New Trailer For ‘The Promise’
Producer Esrailian also had his own thought to share on the score hijacking:
I think the strategy unfortunately works to some extent because it’s confusing and distracting to people and throwing up smokescreens. It doesn’t allow the truth to be as clear, and some people use these sites to determine whether or not they’re going to see the film. Hopefully the truth will shine and we won’t be subject to that.
As the CBS News article notes, “The Promise” was in danger of not being funded before a single Armenian-American investor put $100 million of his money into the movie, thus making this film something of a political football for everyone involved. We weren’t too impressed by the movie coming out of Toronto — we pointed to the film’s “insistent self-importance” and its “hand-holding narrative” as doing a disservice to a necessary story — but that’s a decision we came to by watching the film ourselves without outside interference. If people are being turned away by the IMDb trickery, then whoever was looking to bury “The Promise” might just get what they wanted.