Julia Roberts - Are Studios Paying For Phony Public Movie Reviews?

Many younger moviegoers often proclaim with pride that they never read critics' reviews and that they decide what to see after watching movie trailers and checking out what "ordinary" people have to say about them. Now, that strategy faces its own predicament after suspect messages praising the upcoming Julia Roberts starrer Mirror Mirror began appearing on entertainment websites that featured the movie's trailer. One of them, MovieMavericks.com, noted that the comments hit its site within two hours after it posted the trailer. "These all came from the same IP address (which means the same computer), which we traced to Brooklyn, NY," the website said. Doing some further research, it discovered that the same comments were posted on almost every other site with a mention of Mirror Mirror. As MovieLine.com writer Julie Miller later observed, most comments about the trailer had been negative. (She herself called it "atrocious-looking.") Miller wondered whether "the strangely positive remarks about a trailer that looks exceptionally bad is studio-related." "Oh, puh- leeze ," commented Deadline.com's Nikki Finke. "Studios regularly hire trolls to post comments on the Internet."

24/11/2011