How the Gotti Movie Fell Apart Before it Even Opened – HT
A perfect 0% critics’ score is one of the rarest things in Hollywood. And the 2018 John Travolta movie about John Gotti pulled it off. 58 reviews, not one of them positive. Then the studio’s own marketing campaign turned around and called those critics trolls behind a keyboard. Travolta had spent nearly a decade championing this film.
The Gotti family blessed it. His own wife co-starred. What nobody knew at the time was that the audience scores defending the movie, most of them weren’t real. To understand how this movie failed, you have to understand who it was supposed to be about. John Gotti was not just any mob boss.
He was the most photographed gangster in American history. Custom Brioni suits, hand-tailored silk shirts. He stood on courthouse steps after every acquittal smiling for the cameras like he had just won an Oscar. The newspapers called him the Teflon Don because three federal trials had failed to stick. He signed autographs in Little Italy.
By the time he was finally convicted in 1992 on five murders, racketeering and obstruction of justice, he had become a household name in a way no American mob boss had been since Al Capone. That was the man Travolta was trying to play. Most passion projects take a year, maybe two. A producer falls in love with a story, finds a director, casts an actor, and starts shooting.
Not this one. This one took eight years, cycled through four directors, racked up 44 credited producers, and got dropped by its own studio 10 days before release. And that was before the critics got their hands on it. Um the story starts in 2010. A Florida-based producer named Mark Fiore, a guy with no real Hollywood track record, um did something nobody else had managed to do. He got John Gotti Jr.
um to sell him the rights to his father’s life story. The Gotti family had been turning down offers for years. Sylvester Stallone wanted in. The Gotti family said no. Stallone made an offer. The Gotti family did not accept. So, Stallone walked. And Fiore had the rights to one of the biggest mob stories of the 20th century and absolutely no idea how to make a movie.
That is where it should have died. A guy with rights and no infrastructure. But Fiore had one trick left. Through Marty Ingels, a comedian and the husband of the actress Shirley Jones, Fiore got a meeting with John Travolta. Travolta sat in that meeting, listened to the pitch, and said yes.
The Gotti family approved. Travolta was their first pick. And from that point forward, Travolta was the only constant on a project that would change almost everything else around him over the next eight years. Barry Levinson, the director of Rain Man and Bugsy, signed on first. He paired with Al Pacino, who was attached to play Gotti before Travolta.
Then Levinson left, then Pacino left, then Nick Cassavetes signed on, then Cassavetes left, then Joe Johnston, the director of Captain America: The First Avenger and The Rocketeer, um signed on, then Johnston left. By the time the production found Kevin Connolly in 2015, the project was on its fourth director and had been in development for five years.
Connolly’s biggest credit was playing E on the HBO show Entourage. He had never directed a feature this size before. I’d argue that decision tells you everything you need to know about this production. They handed the keys to a guy whose Hollywood resume was a sitcom sitcom about Hollywood. While the directors were rotating, the casting was collapsing.
Joe Pesci had been promised $3 million to play Angelo Ruggiero, the loud, paranoid Gambino soldier and long-time Gotti enforcer, who got himself nicknamed Quack Quack on FBI wiretaps for never shutting up. Pesci took the role seriously. He gained 30 lb eating heavy Italian meals to look the part.
Then Fiore Films came back to him. The role was changing. He would be playing Lucchese underboss, Anthony Casso, instead. It was a smaller part and the salary was getting cut to $1 million. dollars. Pesci sued for $3 million dollars alleging breach of contract, fraud, and misappropriation of likeness. The case settled out of court.
Terms were undisclosed. He left the production 30 lb heavier and several lawsuits richer. The role of Ruggiero went to Pruitt Taylor Vince. That’s the kind of dysfunction that usually kills a movie before it ever shoots. I think the Pesci lawsuit alone would have buried a lesser production. Somehow, this one kept going.
Filming finally started in July of 2016 in Cincinnati of all places because the production could not afford New York. The $10 million budget was a fraction of what comparable mob films like Black Mass had to work with. They shot exteriors in Brooklyn the following winter. Uh the Gotti family gave Travolta access to their home and personal belongings.
He wore uh John Gotti’s actual jewelry and handkerchiefs. One of the overcoats still had Gotti’s cologne on it. Think about that for a second. The man who owned that coat had run the Gambino family for five years, beaten three federal trials, and become a national celebrity. The movie they were making about him would get 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Kelly Preston wore Victoria Gotti’s wedding ring, the ring John had bought her decades earlier. Everyone was committed except the people responsible for actually putting the movie in theaters. Lionsgate had agreed to distribute. December 15th, 2017 was the release date, aiming for awards season placement at um a theatrical run, uh the whole package.
Then, 10 days before the release date, Lionsgate exercised a buyback clause and walked away. They sold the film back to its producers. The studio had decided to dump Gotti onto a limited theatrical and video-on-demand release through their boutique label. To Travolta, that read as a death sentence. He worked behind the scenes with an investor named Edward Walson, an outside financier with no Hollywood credits, uh to buy the film back from Lionsgate entirely.
Then Travolta gave a press tour calling the Lionsgate retreat fake news and saying he had begged them to let it go so the producers could pursue a wider release. Cannes was about to make it worse. The film premiered there in May 2018, uh but not in the main competition, and not even in the prestige sidebar. Cannes screened Gotti in the Salle Buñuel, a small upstairs venue in the Palais des Festivals.
Critics from uh IndieWire and The Hollywood Reporter were there. Both reviews were brutal. The bad word of mouth was already spreading before the film hit American theaters. By the time June 15th, 2018 rolled around and Gotti opened in 503 theaters across the United States, critics had loaded their guns.
Variety called it comes off feeling like a bad taste hagiography uh and said there should be a law against movies like this. Brian Tallerico at rogerebert.com wrote that he may have been a murderer, but even Gotti deserved better than this. Rolling Stone called it an offer John Travolta should have refused.
One reviewer called it the Gigli of gangster movies, something astoundingly incoherent. Another uh said the editing was so choppy, the narrative was borderline incomprehensible. Which, if you don’t remember Gigli, is the kind of comparison accountants make when they’re crying. 58 reviews, average score 2.2 out of 10.
The kind of number you only see when something has gone really, fundamentally, structurally wrong. You’ve made it this far. Hit subscribe. Stories like this drop every week. Within 48 hours of Gotti opening, a film critic named Dan Murrell at ScreenJunkies posted on Twitter that something was wrong with the film’s audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The audience score was high, like weirdly, conspicuously high. While critics were giving the film an average of 2.2, audiences were giving it numbers in the 70s and 80s. That alone wasn’t suspicious. Audiences and critics disagree all the time. What was suspicious was the volume. The film was in limited release, and within days, more than 7,000 people had left audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.
The math didn’t work. The percentage of viewers leaving reviews was dramatically higher than for any normal release. That was the first thing the public noticed. Then Reddit users got involved and they pulled apart the actual review accounts. If that were the only problem, Gotti might have survived it, but then came what Reddit found.
Of the first 54 audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, 45 came from accounts created in June of 2018. Brand new accounts created the same month the film opened. Of those 45, 32 had only reviewed two films total. Gotti and a smaller film called American Animals. American Animals had one thing in common with Gotti.
Both were partially financed by a company called MoviePass Ventures. I would argue if you’re going to manufacture an audience, you don’t do it with brand new accounts that have only ever reviewed your own movies. Uh, that’s not astroturfing. That’s leaving fingerprints. You’d think someone at MoviePass would have said something.
Nobody did. Uh, the pattern got even more specific. Several days later, a leaked statement from Rotten Tomatoes confirmed they’d received complaints. Their official response was, “We closely monitor our platforms and haven’t determined there to be any problems.” MoviePass denied any involvement telling Gizmodo their marketing team was only engaged in sending promotional emails and push notifications to our users.
Nobody admitted anything. The accounts kept reviewing, the score kept climbing. The Rotten Tomatoes statement is the most Hollywood sentence ever written. “We’ve looked into the problem. There is no problem. Move along.” And then the Gotti marketing campaign decided to make it worse. Within days of the audience score scandal breaking, the official Gotti social media accounts pushed out a new ad.
The ad showed clips from the film and then a tagline appeared on screen. It said, “Audiences loved it. Critics put out the hit. Who would you trust more? Yourself or a troll behind a keyboard?” Companion social media post said, “Audiences loved Gotti, but critics uh don’t want you to see it.
” The question was, “Who do you trust?” I think about that ad campaign and I can’t decide what’s more remarkable that a studio called paying critics trolls in their own marketing uh or that they thought it would work. Within a week, late-night hosts including Stephen Colbert were running the troll behind the keyboard line as a punchline.
The marketing campaign that was supposed to defend the film became its most mocked feature. The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, and Variety, every trade publication ran follow-ups. The Reddit investigation went viral. The audience score story eclipsed the film itself. Gotti opened to $1.7 million on its first weekend.
It finished its theatrical run with $6.4 million worldwide against a $10 million production budget. Before marketing and distribution costs, the film lost money. Not because audiences hated it, because audiences barely showed up at all. The conversation was no longer about Travolta or Gotti. It was about MoviePass. Six months later, the Razzie nominations came out.
Gotti picked up six nominations. Worst picture, worst actor for Travolta, worst director for Connolly, worst screenplay, worst screen combo for Travolta and Preston, worst remake or rip-off. It tied for the most nominations of any film that year. Travolta did not win worst actor. He did not need to. The damage was done.
MoviePass shut down its service in 2019 and filed for bankruptcy in early 2020. The company had bled investor money on a subscription model that did not add up. The Gotti scandal was not the cause. It was a symptom. Um a company willing to allegedly tilt review scores for a film it had financial stakes in was a company that did not understand the business it was in. Investors noticed.
The collapse was inevitable. Kelly Preston died of breast cancer in July of 2020. Gotti was her uh penultimate film. Spencer Lofranco, the actor who played John Gotti Jr. on screen, died at 33 in 2025. Kevin Connolly has not directed another major studio feature since. Anthony Rugiano Jr., a former Gambino associate who had known some of the people the film depicted, uh gave Gotti an eight out of 10 for accuracy.
He praised the way the film showed how the Gambinos hid in plain sight. He praised the use of crash cars during hits. He said that’s exactly how it went down. Uh, it is a strange uh irony uh and that detail matters more than any Razzie nomination. The one group of people you would think would be most critical, the actual mafia, were the only ones who liked it.
John Travolta gave a series of interviews after the dust settled calling Gotti America’s most interesting untold story and saying the family’s blessing meant more to him than any critic’s review. He stood by the film. The Gotti family stood by the film. The audience never showed up. In 2023, Netflix released a three-part documentary called Get Gotti.
It used real FBI surveillance footage, interviews with prosecutors, and contemporary news coverage. It was reviewed well. It told the story Travolta had spent eight years trying to tell. And it told it better, faster, and at a fraction of the cost. The real John Gotti was always going to be more compelling on screen than any actor playing him.
The film Travolta thought he was making, the definitive Gotti biopic, was already being made by other people with better tools while he was still trying to get his out the door. “America’s most interesting untold story.” Uh, that’s how Travolta described it at Cannes. Uh, eight years, four directors, 44 producers, six Razzie nominations, a perfect 0% critic score, and an audience score the studio’s own marketing team had to defend by calling reviewers trolls.
Maybe it was the most interesting untold story. Maybe it just wasn’t his story to tell. The real John Gotti had been a man who on a December afternoon in 1985 watched four men in trench coats walk up to Sparks Steak House and gunned down the boss standing in his way. Within two weeks, he was running the Gambino family.
Within a decade, he was a household name. Eight years and 44 producers could not capture any of it. The man was always going to be more interesting than the movie. More stories like this one drop every week. Hit subscribe.