By Christopher Hooton
Either there are some absolutely enormous cinemas that I’ve somehow never heard about, or IMDb users are voting politically on The Promise without having seen it.
The Terry George-directed film stars Christian Bale and Oscar Isaac and is set during the final days of the Ottoman Empire, leading up to the Armenian Genocide that killed 1.5 million.
At the time of writing, it has 86,704 ratings on IMDb, 55,126 of which are one-star and 30,639 of which are 10-star, with very few ratings falling anywhere in between. The majority of votes come from males outside the US.
The Promise is believed to have only been screened to the public three times (we have contacted production company Survival Pictures for confirmation on this).
Armenian Diaspora communities have long been campaigning for recognition of the genocide by governments around the world. In 2010, a US congressional panel narrowly voted that the incident was indeed a genocide, a decision the Turkish government criticised, saying it had been accused of a crime it “had not committed”.
It is IMDb’s policy not to interfere with user ratings, but many have called for the database to step in.