Brandwatch Bulletin #142: The Scorsese Film You’ll Never See

A dose of unreality.

25 November 2022

The internet, when it puts its collective mind to it, can achieve incredible things. And when it gets creative, it gets really creative.

Enter Goncharov, the 1973 Martin Scorsese gangster film which sees a Russian fleeing the collapse of the Soviet Union to Naples, and entering the underworld of organised crime.

You probably haven’t seen it, and that’s because it doesn’t exist. The internet made the whole thing up and got over 200k people talking about it.

Here’s how it went down.

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The greatest mafia movie never made

Goncharov, despite not being real, has a plot, characters, themes, soundtrack, posters, production backstory, and everything else that comes with a real film.

All of this has been created collectively and spontaneously, with no direction or person leading the way, en masse by Tumblr users (although other sites are beginning to contribute). The concept is being referred to as “unreality”.

With 200k users getting involved, this collective near-hallucination isn’t exactly niche, with many contributing to the lore, creating fanart, and generally posting as though the film exists. For this dedication, we’re writing Goncharov in honourary italics, out of respect. Capiche?

Below you can see just how quickly the ‘film’ has attracted attention.

But how did this all begin?

For that, we need to go back a whole ten years.

The origins of Goncharov

It all began with Tumblr user zootycoon (named after the game Zoo Tycoon), ordering a pair of boots online around August 2020. When they arrived, instead of a brand label, they found something very odd stitched there instead.

I’m not sure we’ll ever know why this label was put on these shoes, but there is an explanation as to where all the words come from.

Essentially someone put the below real film poster through an optical scanner, creating the blueprint for the shoe label above. Clearly the scanner was not a great one, which led to a myriad of mistakes, the most important being turning ‘Gomorrah’ into ‘Goncharov’.

It could have all ended there with zootycoon’s post going viral and then disappearing into the ether. Instead another Tumblr user named abandonedambition replied with the following, becoming the snowflake that sets off an avalanche.

After this post Goncharov existed as an obscure piece of Tumblr lore, occasionally mentioned with some fondness, as an in-joke, or with a near-magical sense of foresight.

That post was made by margieargie in April 2021. How little they knew.

From AI prompt to collective fever dream

We now jump forward to October of this year, specifically to the 26th when calidotgov posts the following words to Tumblr:

“average “film bro” doesnt even know the majesty of martin scorsese’s goncharov”

This was reblogged over 6k times and caused a brief resurgence in Goncharov posting, introducing it to a whole slew of new users who weren’t around for the OG boots. You can just make out this event in the earlier line chart, and while levels quieted down, new Goncharov jokes and references were being made each day.

Then, in November with the above post still being reblogged, a Twitter call for fake film descriptions to make some AI art was answered by @MinmoMarques.

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The @ai_curio happily obliged with the image below, creating a Tumblr-influenced Twitter post that immediately leaked back to Tumblr.

A few days later we entered the Goncharov era as Tumblr posts skyrocketed, with Twitter joining the fray just behind.

From what we can tell, the key post that kicked everything off was this incredible fan-made film poster, created by beelzeebub.

Collective creativity

Within a week Goncharov had everything. Multiple posters, trailers, soundtracks, plotlines, fan theories, fan art, reviews, DVDs, alternate cuts, and a whole host of other lore and content that most real films will never see.

To get a taste of the breadth of works created, and the effort put into them, have a scroll through the #Goncharov Tumblr tag.

It is an incredible example of what people are capable of creating simply to entertain each other and to feel connected with others, even over a movie that isn’t real. And just as we saw with Furbys, this is a prime case of the unique culture of Tumblr and its users.

Tumblr-adjacent sites have also seen an influx of Goncharov posts, particularly An Archive of Our Own (AO3). AO3 is a website where people can post their own fanfiction, and it’s been popular with Tumblr users for many years.

Scorsese’s non-existent film has been a hit on the site, although even we were surprised at just how popular it’s become.

This is a damning indictment of Scorcese’s talent, I’m sure you’ll agree.

We recommend throwing yourself in the world of Goncharov and seeing what you discover. It’s impossible to do this body of work justice in an email. We’re willing to bet we’ll see some kind of film version before long.

And if you’re wondering what you could get out of this bizarre story, here’s an excellent tip.

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The Brandwatch Bulletin team

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