Everybody’s a Movie Critic: New Web Sites and Online Readers Chime In
LOS ANGELES — They have suffered pay cuts, layoffs and Hollywood’s urge to write them off every time a poorly reviewed movie makes good at the box office.
But America’s film critics, an ornery lot, are not dead yet. In fact, their craft has shown flickering signs of new life lately — though not the kind that leaves ink-stained cinephiles entirely comfortable.
The last few weeks have brought the debut of Moviereviewintelligence.com, a new Web site committed to monitoring, scoring and proliferating the work of critics at some 65 print and broadcast outlets.
Started by David A. Gross, a former marketing executive with 20th Century Fox, the new site is replete with charts and graphs that track the good, the bad and the ugly of reviews.
Those numbers assess matters as granular as the average time at which reviews appear after the movie’s release (1.4 hours after release for “Land of the Lost” ) and the productivity of individual critics (Leah Rozen at People is good for 2.6 reviews a week, with an average length of 119 words).
Movie Review Intelligence joins Rottentomatoes.com and Metacritic.com, a pair of Web sites that have been aggregating and scoring movie reviews for years — and which have both been stepping things up.
Rotten Tomatoes, which gets about four million visitors a month, according to the market research company comScore, now uses Twitter to gin up interest in the fluctuating critical scores of new films on its Tomatometer, a system for rating movies based on input from hundreds of conventional and online critics. “It’s like a sports score,” Shannon Ludovissy, the Web site’s general manager, said in a telephone interview last week. “People want to know what the Tomatometer score is.”
Disney marketers validated the growing impact of such critical scoring this month when they included Rotten Tomatoes’ “98 percent Fresh” rating in advertisements for the studio’s animated film “Up.” (A score of 60 percent or higher is “fresh.” Everything else is “rotten.”)Metacritic — an eight-year-old site that compiles film, music, games and television reviews — gets about two million visitors a month and has set a peak traffic record over the last few days.
“We have a lot of people who have us bookmarked,” Marc Doyle, a co-founder of Metacritic, said of the site’s following. “This is not search-engine traffic.”
But it’s been a different story at established newspapers and alternative weeklies, where film critics have been dropped or reassigned. That provoked hand-wringing about the future of professionally written movie reviews.
Moviecitynews.com even began an online death watch over “The Last 126 Film Critics in America,” crossing off reviewers as their jobs fell away.
As of the most recent Movie City update, 121 of those “last critics” were still standing, among them Kenneth Turan at The Los Angeles Times, Todd McCarthy at Variety and Joe Morgenstern at The Wall Street Journal.
But according to research conducted for Movie Review Intelligence by MarketCast, a Los Angeles company, film reviews still matter to the moviegoing public. About 71.5 million people follow film reviews to some extent, and about 48 percent of those who see 12 movies or more per year read reviews at least several times a month.
The upside in all the online aggregation is not lost on critics: better, after all, to be eyeing Mr. Gross’s elaborate scoring of your output than waiting around for professional obituaries.
“These sites serve a clear and valuable purpose,” Owen Gleiberman, who reviews for Entertainment Weekly, wrote in an e-mail exchange last week.
Mr. Gleiberman and other critics acknowledge that the aggregators — including broad-gauge sites like Yahoo! Movies (movies.yahoo.com), which also compiles critical scores — are bringing new, and younger, readers to their work.
But critics remain a wary lot.
A. O. Scott, co-chief movie critic for The New York Times, pointed out that many new readers are also citizen-writers, who flood the digital universe with their own thoughts about films — and about the critics who are paid to judge them.
“So the paradox is that the Web has invigorated criticism as an activity while undermining it as a profession,” Mr. Scott said.
Mr. Gleiberman went further.
The Web, he said, is changing criticism, by creating pressure on reviewers to join a powerful consensus that takes shape as critical scores, reports of online ticket sales from Fandango and Movietickets.com, and the general Internet buzz builds around a film like “Up” or “Star Trek” in the days before release.
“I know way too many critics who now think it’s their job to serve the collective, to get behind a certain worthy movie because they’re going to look out of the loop if they don’t,” Mr. Gleiberman wrote.
“The fanboys can be merciless,” he added. “Especially if you’re the one lonely critic who stopped a film from being 100 percent fresh.”
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
But America’s film critics, an ornery lot, are not dead yet. In fact, their craft has shown flickering signs of new life lately — though not the kind that leaves ink-stained cinephiles entirely comfortable.
The last few weeks have brought the debut of Moviereviewintelligence.com, a new Web site committed to monitoring, scoring and proliferating the work of critics at some 65 print and broadcast outlets.
Started by David A. Gross, a former marketing executive with 20th Century Fox, the new site is replete with charts and graphs that track the good, the bad and the ugly of reviews.
Those numbers assess matters as granular as the average time at which reviews appear after the movie’s release (1.4 hours after release for “Land of the Lost” ) and the productivity of individual critics (Leah Rozen at People is good for 2.6 reviews a week, with an average length of 119 words).
Movie Review Intelligence joins Rottentomatoes.com and Metacritic.com, a pair of Web sites that have been aggregating and scoring movie reviews for years — and which have both been stepping things up.
Rotten Tomatoes, which gets about four million visitors a month, according to the market research company comScore, now uses Twitter to gin up interest in the fluctuating critical scores of new films on its Tomatometer, a system for rating movies based on input from hundreds of conventional and online critics. “It’s like a sports score,” Shannon Ludovissy, the Web site’s general manager, said in a telephone interview last week. “People want to know what the Tomatometer score is.”
Disney marketers validated the growing impact of such critical scoring this month when they included Rotten Tomatoes’ “98 percent Fresh” rating in advertisements for the studio’s animated film “Up.” (A score of 60 percent or higher is “fresh.” Everything else is “rotten.”)Metacritic — an eight-year-old site that compiles film, music, games and television reviews — gets about two million visitors a month and has set a peak traffic record over the last few days.
“We have a lot of people who have us bookmarked,” Marc Doyle, a co-founder of Metacritic, said of the site’s following. “This is not search-engine traffic.”
But it’s been a different story at established newspapers and alternative weeklies, where film critics have been dropped or reassigned. That provoked hand-wringing about the future of professionally written movie reviews.
Moviecitynews.com even began an online death watch over “The Last 126 Film Critics in America,” crossing off reviewers as their jobs fell away.
As of the most recent Movie City update, 121 of those “last critics” were still standing, among them Kenneth Turan at The Los Angeles Times, Todd McCarthy at Variety and Joe Morgenstern at The Wall Street Journal.
But according to research conducted for Movie Review Intelligence by MarketCast, a Los Angeles company, film reviews still matter to the moviegoing public. About 71.5 million people follow film reviews to some extent, and about 48 percent of those who see 12 movies or more per year read reviews at least several times a month.
The upside in all the online aggregation is not lost on critics: better, after all, to be eyeing Mr. Gross’s elaborate scoring of your output than waiting around for professional obituaries.
“These sites serve a clear and valuable purpose,” Owen Gleiberman, who reviews for Entertainment Weekly, wrote in an e-mail exchange last week.
Mr. Gleiberman and other critics acknowledge that the aggregators — including broad-gauge sites like Yahoo! Movies (movies.yahoo.com), which also compiles critical scores — are bringing new, and younger, readers to their work.
But critics remain a wary lot.
A. O. Scott, co-chief movie critic for The New York Times, pointed out that many new readers are also citizen-writers, who flood the digital universe with their own thoughts about films — and about the critics who are paid to judge them.
“So the paradox is that the Web has invigorated criticism as an activity while undermining it as a profession,” Mr. Scott said.
Mr. Gleiberman went further.
The Web, he said, is changing criticism, by creating pressure on reviewers to join a powerful consensus that takes shape as critical scores, reports of online ticket sales from Fandango and Movietickets.com, and the general Internet buzz builds around a film like “Up” or “Star Trek” in the days before release.
“I know way too many critics who now think it’s their job to serve the collective, to get behind a certain worthy movie because they’re going to look out of the loop if they don’t,” Mr. Gleiberman wrote.
“The fanboys can be merciless,” he added. “Especially if you’re the one lonely critic who stopped a film from being 100 percent fresh.”
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
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