Are Print Movie Critics an Endangered Species?
Posted on April 9, 2008
Movie critics are about to become an endangered species, according to The New York Times.
The week before, two longtime critics at Newsday - Jan Stuart and Gene Seymour - took buyouts, along with their editor. And at Newsweek, David Ansen is among 111 staff members taking buyouts, according to a report in Radar. They join critics at more than a dozen daily newspapers (including those in Denver, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale) and several alternative weeklies who have been laid off, reassigned or bought out in the past few years, deemed expendable at a time when revenues at print publications are declining, under pressure from Web alternatives and a growing recession in media spending.We believe that film criticism is a thriving art, but that the format is merely changing. Look at the popularity of RottenTomatoes: people love to read about a film before they see it and after they've seen it they like to see what everyone else thought. At least we do. But then again, we're obsessive readers, writers, critics, filmgoers and bloggers around here.Given that movie blogs are strewn about the Web like popcorn on a theater floor, there are those who say that movie criticism is not going away, it's just appearing on a different platform. And no one would argue that fewer critics and the adjectives they hurl would imperil the opening of Iron Man in May. But for a certain kind of movie, critical accolades can mean the difference between relevance and obscurity, not to mention box office success or failure.
"For those of us who are making work that requires a kind of intellectual conversation, we rely on that talk to do the work of getting people interested," said Mr. Rudin, who produced No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, two Oscar-nominated and critically championed films last year. "All of the talk about No Country, all of the argument about the ending, kept that film in the forefront of the conversation" and helped it win the best picture Oscar.