Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas is continuing to suffer after he issued a plea for his followers to fix the ratings. The result has been the exact opposite, and as Cameron doubles down on tales of his movie’s success, new evidence emerges suggesting that these claims aren’t exactly true.
It started with movie rating website Rotten Tomatoes, and a less-than-stellar rating for Saving Christmas. Cameron apparently decided that he could change that, with the help of his social media followers.
He posted the following on November 20th:
Help me storm the gates of Rotten Tomatoes!
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/kirk_camerons_saving_christmas/
All of you who love Saving Christmas – go rate it at Rotten Tomatoes right now and send the message to all the critics that WE decide what movies we want our families to see! If 2,000 of you (out of almost 2 million on this page) take a minute to rate Saving Christmas, it will give the film a huge boost and more will see it as a result!
Thank you for all your help and support in putting the joy of Christ back in Christmas!
It was a mistake.
The atheist community of Reddit quickly got wind of Kirk Cameron’s attempts to save Saving Christmas, and decided to counterbalance any new ratings he might inspire. There was an immediate swell in ratings, but then they began to fall. Though the movie briefly reached a rating of ‘94% liked it,’ once the numbers began to fall, they didn’t stop. The rating soon fell to 66%, after which the descent slowed, but didn’t stop. (It’s currently at 32%.)
Cameron didn’t stop, either. Claiming that the movie was surging to new heights in ratings, he called for his followers to continue combating the ‘atheists and haters’ who were destroying his ratings. Unfortunately for Cameron, by that time, the movie’s ratings were already in free fall.
Now the haters and atheists are coming out of the woodwork, attempting to hammer your good work (they rallied to drop your rating super low). They are attempting, once again, to ruin Saving Christmas for everyone. Look at their language, vulgarity, and spirit of hate. They can try to ruin a rating, but they can’t stop you from going with family and friends to see Saving Christmas this weekend! If people continue to turn out, the theaters will hold the movie longer. YOU have the power, just like with Rotten Tomatoes, to keep Saving Christmas in the theaters.
That wasn’t all, though. There surfaced a new campaign: Saving Christmas was already suffering a pretty low rating on IMDB, but with a few hundred more ratings, it would be IMDB’s lowest ranked movie of all time. Cameron posted about the campaign on his movie’s website, but he wasn’t able to prevent the ratings from happening, and before long, it was declared: Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas was officially the lowest-ranked movie of all time on IMDB.
Note that “Bottom 100 #1” beneath Saving Christmas?
Still, Cameron has kept making claims. The following is also from the movie’s website.
In the last week, we’ve seen an unprecedented campaign against Christian moviemaker Kirk Cameron’s film “Saving Christmas.” But the ironic thing is they are inadvertently filling theaters with moviegoers wondering what all the fuss is about.
“Saving Christmas” was originally scheduled for a limited two-week run in a few selected cities. However, with all the publicity that atheists have generated denouncing the film, it has been held over — and is expanding to new cities.
Unfortunately, blogger JoeMyGod saw through this and checked the numbers. Box Office Mojo says Saving Christmas made $135k this weekend, showing on 294 screens, for an average of $459 per screen.
Assuming $8 average per ticket (checking theaters, we found prices ranging from $7.50 to $10.50), that works out to fewer than sixty people per screen, and if each screen ran the movie, say, 15 times over the weekend, that’s about four people in each audience. Even if a theater ran it only six times over the weekend, that’s an audience of ten.
Meanwhile, on Cameron’s Facbook page:
I love hearing about whole families going to see Saving Christmas together.
Perhaps he means one or two families per showing.
Is this proof of the ‘war on Christmas?’ More likely it’s a good sign that the internet doesn’t like it much when you try to artificially inflate numbers and pretend that something is more loved than it really is. Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas isn’t the subject of this campaign because of a hatred of Christ or Christianity, but instead, due to backlash for an attempted ratings fix.