Turkey refuses to acknowledge the mass murder of 1.5 million Armenians as a Genocide. It is actually illegal to talk about this genocide if you are a Turkish citizen. So there is a lot of hate from Turkey towards anything that calls the death of the Armenians in World War 1 a Genocide. Continuing that thought a Turkish forum website called Incisozluk swayed thousands of Turks to give horrible reviews on the Armenian Genocide film called The Promise before the film was even released. Many of the negative reviews were made on websites like The International Movie Database. The Turks were giving the film the lowest rating possible on IMDb which is one star and these low reviews included some hateful comments like the one below:
“This a lesson that you don't f*** with Turks. We'll kick your a****! This is just a start,”
The Armenians and Supporters of the film however began to fight back and posted a bunch of 10 star reviews on the website. The Promise had about 96,000 reviews on IMDb before it was released. That is more reviews on IMDb than Box Office leader at the time Beauty and the Beast, and The Promise had not even been released yet.
Out of the 96,000 pre-release reviews 61,000 were one star negative reviews and the rest were 10 star reviews. The early bad ratings are said to be the reason why The Promise did not do very well at the box office. The Promise now has almost 150,000 reviews on IMDb. Now there are about 15,000 more 10 star ratings than one star ratings. It is interesting to see how these ratings have played out because if you look at the chart below that there are virtually no ratings in between 1 and 10.
Current IMDb Ratings
I would recommend going and supporting this film, because it covers an important part of history in the most captivating and jaw dropping way. This film has done terrible in the box office due to these bad reviews and other publicity attacks. Thanks for reading please post your thoughts in the comments
Sources:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/21/christian-bale-historic-romance-promise-targeted-turkish-online/
https://www.christiantoday.com/article/the.promise.review.a.film.targeted.by.genocide.deniers.is.moving.and.timely/105819.htm
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4425456/The-Promise-tanks-IMDB-release-thanks-Turks.html