Entertainment
MoviePass Ventures
John Travolta in "Gotti."
- John Travolta's new mob biopic, "Gotti," was slaughtered by critics ahead of its opening this weekend.
- The film brought in $1.67 million, 40% of which reportedly came from MoviePass, which acquired an equity stake in the film earlier this year.
- "Gotti" currently has a 0% "rotten" rating on the reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
John Travolta's new mob movie, "Gotti," premiered this weekend to a poor box-office performance and universal critical panning, and MoviePass appears to be the only thing giving it a semblance of a pulse.
MoviePass invested in "Gotti" earlier this year through its MoviePass Ventures subsidary, which the company created to take equity stakes in movies. MoviePass accounted for 40% ($668,000) of the film's $1.67 million opening weekend, according to Deadline.
MoviePass acquired a stake in "Gotti" in April, making it the second movie it invested in through MoviePass Ventures. The company first acquired a stake in the heist movie "American Animals," which debuted in a limited opening to critical acclaim. "American Animals" currently stands at a box office haul of $760,545, according to Box Office Mojo.
"'Gotti' is precisely the type of film we established MoviePass Ventures to support," MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe said of the Travolta film in a statement in April. "We are helping boost traffic to these theaters for people to see these great films."
"Gotti" undoubtedly suffered from going into its opening weekend with a 0% "rotten" rating on the reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
Many critics did not hold back in their reviews.
"I'd rather wake up next to a severed horse head than ever watch 'Gotti' again," New York Post critic Johnny Oleksinski wrote in a review.
"That the long-gestating crime drama Gotti is a dismal mess comes as no surprise. What does shock is just how multifaceted a dismal mess it is," wrote Glenn Kenney for The New York Times.
Meanwhile, MoviePass hit three million subscribers last week, which prompted Ted Farnsworth, the head of its parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics, to claim that the company could break even at five million subscribers.
But it's unclear how MoviePass could accomplish this given that it currently loses money on every additional subscriber, has been burning cash at a rate of over $20 million per month, and invests in movies that aren't exactly piling up money.