John Travolta’s Gotti Movie Isn’t Coming Out Next Week As Planned
My apologies to those of you who jumped into your end-of-the-world bunker after reading that headline too fast, because you thought that the Four Horsemen were about to run over your ass now that John Travolta has “come out.”
During simpler times in 2011, John Travolta announced that he was going to slap a mob boss wig onto his head to play John Gotti in a biopic called Gotti. Producers threw a press conference to announce the movie and used Lindsay Lohan to get attention for it. (They said LiLo was in talks to play Gotti’s daughter Victoria and that went nowhere.) After years and years of “development,” shooting finally started in July 2016 with Kevin Connolly (that light brown-haired one from Entourage) as the movie’s director, Travolta as Gotti and Kelly Preston as Gotti’s wife Victoria. Gotti was supposed to come out December 15 (just in time to get all the Oscar nominations it was never going to get), but that’s not going to happen anymore. Its distributor Lionsgate has pulled it from its schedule. I wonder why?! A silence has filled the bathhouse in the Scientology Celebrity Center as the boys prepare for their leader to get exposed for the ten hundredth time.
The Tracking Board reported yesterday that Lionsgate dropped Gotti and sold its distribution rights back to the movie’s producers. The producers are looking for a new distributor, so Gotti probably won’t come out until 2018. But wait! Polyester fumes are wafting off of John’s wig today because he’s raging mad over the lies that have been told. John tells Deadline that Lionsgate never dropped Gotti. Lionsgate was planning to release Gotti in a small number of theaters and John didn’t like that. So John found a producer, Edward Walson, to get the money to buy Lionsgate out and shop the movie to a distributor who will give it a bigger release. The phrase “fake news” can now be covered with concrete and dropped into the ocean since John Travolta has used it while talking about the future of his shit movie.
“Unfortunately, the reports were speculation bordering on fake news. Lionsgate was planning on a minimal release, and I did an investigation into people who might have the interest and financial wherewithal to better release it. Ed is a fan of mine and of the Gotti story and really wanted to see the movie. I invited his group, they saw it and bought it. That is the simple explanation for this. It wasn’t dropped. It wasn’t easy to get Lionsgate to give it up. They said no, twice, and I literally begged them to reconsider and they finally and generously let it go. We signed this deal about three weeks ago, to purchase back the film from Lionsgate. Our mistake was we should have said something right then and discussed our plan for the film. We didn’t anticipate this speculation that is so grossly wrong.”
Mostly everything that comes out of a Scientologist’s mouth is a certified lie, so I don’t totally believe everything that John is saying. And there’s a major part of me that still thinks Lionsgate pulled the movie because they don’t want to have to release an awkward statement after The New York Times publishes a ten-part story on the misadventures of John Travolta’s crotch-grabbing wandering paws.
But limited release or wide release, the only people who are going to see this USA Network-looking turd (no offense to USA Network movies) are Scientologists and that’s only because they’ll be forced to do so. I know, Scientology torture knows no bounds.
Pic: Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films