The new Ben Affleck, Justin Timberlake movie “Runner Runner” about a young man (Timberlake) who believes he got fleeced by an offshore poker site (run by Affleck’s character.) The movie has already sparked quite the political debate about legalizing online gaming in this country.
On the surface, this “cautionary tale” of a film appears to be bad for the burgeoning legal U.S. online gaming industry, representing all that’s wrong with illegal online gaming, aka unregulated offshore gaming. But land-based casinos in the United States are seizing on the film’s illustration of the potential dangers of unregulated online gaming in order to push for online gambling legalization in the country so the industry can be properly regulated.
The American Gaming Association, which boasts a membership that includes MGM and Caesar’s, even bought ads on Google, Twitter, Facebook, and IMDB.com calling for a nationwide law legalizing and regulating online gaming in the country. The ad will pop up anytime a user conducts a search for the title of the movie. The AGA’s President Geoff Freeman said that illegal offshore online gaming sites raked in $2.6 billion off U.S. players in 2012.
Meanwhile, anti-gaming organizations like the nonprofit Stop Predatory Gambling Foundation wrote a letter to the lobby for the casino industry calling the ads dishonest, pointing to comments quoted directly from the film’s screenwriters stating the script was never meant to be taken as a “political parable”, with the demand that the ads be taken down.
Whether or not this politicization of the “Runner Runner” film will have an affect on the push to launch intrastate legal online poker in various states in the country (the first being Nevada, Delaware, and New Jersey) remains to be seen. Ultimately box office audiences may have the final word.