A form of deceptive marketing that gets almost no attention

Misleading or deceptive advertising is illegal in most countries. Or, if not outright illegal, at least widely considered ethically questionable, and typically receiving condemnation and warnings from governmental or quasi-governmental ethics organizations.

Of course this doesn't mean that companies and marketers haven't figured out tons and tons of ways to do deceptive marketing that flies under the radar or otherwise gets mostly unnoticed and doesn't get enough paid-attention-to.

One of these is the artificial and deceptive inflation of opening week movie ticket sales by movie producers. After all, the number of sold movie tickets during the first week (or even just the first weekend) of a movie release is a very significant metric used to determine how successful a movie is. And thus, by implication, how "good" the movie is supposed to be. It may well dissuade a lot of people to go watch the movie if they see that it ranks very high in the charts of sold first-week-movie-tickets.

But how do they artificially inflate those numbers?

By literally just buying a boatload of movie tickets in movie theaters (usually in less popular areas where movie theaters are usually half-empty anyway). The marketing team just buys a huge amount of movie tickets and that's it. Obviously nobody shows up with those tickets, but that doesn't matter. The statistics are taken from the number of sold tickets, not by the number of people who actually show up to view the movie.

Huge blockbuster movies use literally millions and even tens of millions of dollars for marketing alone. (In fact, I believe that with the biggest-budgeted movies the marketing budget can literally be over 100 million dollars.) Spending eg. 100 thousand dollars to by 10 thousands movie tickets is pocket money in comparison, especially since they are getting a significant portion of it back. If this is done in movie theaters where history has shown that the screenings typically don't get even half-full, this can seriously inflate the numbers by filling up those half-empty screenings... at least apparently, according to sold tickets.

There are proven cases of this happening out there. Yet, this kind of deceptive marketing, of artificially inflating sales numbers in order to fool people into believing a movie is more popular than it actually is, receives little to no attention.