Earlier in the week, I wrote about the “Deal” a new poker movie which is being released this Friday. Early reviews from top film critics have been very negative and one reviewer even said that this movie is worse then “Lucky You”!
When I watched the trailer my first thought was that the movie looked very formulaic and basically pretty lame and my guess was they made the movie to make a quick buck on the popularity of poker. It seems like my first reaction was right…On rotten tomatoes the current score is 0/11, giving it a score of 0%. This means that 11 reviewers think this movie is rotten (in other terms, they wouldn’t recommend it) while no reviewers have thought it was worth seeing.
I went to the official “Deal” website which was hard to do because when you put “deal poker movie” in google it is no where to be found. Finally once I found the site I saw that there are quotes from professional poker players saying just how good the movie is and how authentic it is. Popular players such as Phil Laak, Antonio Estafandi, Joseph Hachem…all give their praise with quotes from each of them. Funny though, when you check the credits for the movie all of the players are actually in the movie….so can’t say they are the most trusted sources.
I haven’t actually seen any TV ads but have heard some radio ads and have also seen some banners on popular poker sites. It looks like the studio knows it has a bad movie on their hand and don’t want to waste money promoting it.
It will be interesting to see how well the movie does this weekend in terms of gross revenue. From the early reviewers it sounds like this should have been a straight to DVD release.
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