Freezing Out The Critics - Forbes.com

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Unsolicited Advice
Freezing Out The Critics
Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollak 04.19.06, 1:30 PM ET


Here's a $64,000 question: Say you're running a movie studio and you know your upcoming release is bound to be panned. How do you sell it to the critics?

Answer: Check your premises. Don't assume advance screenings to critics are a must.

Increasingly, that's what studios are doing. According to a recent AP report, 11 movies so far this year haven't been shown to critics--up from two in the same period last year.

For the folks who make their living reviewing films, this new tactic adds insult to injury. Not only do they have to forgo the ego boost of VIP treatment--but now they also have to rush to regular old premieres, sitting next to the hoi polloi (read: you and me). Being able to drop hints about the new Woody Allen or Terrence Malick flick makes you the envy of any social set. Having to spend the evening at the local multiplex to catch the opening of Benchwarmers or Phat Girlz makes you a regular working Joe or Jane.

For movie studios, freezing critics out of select premieres might have been a smart move even decades ago. As with all complex products, there's plenty that can go wrong with a movie. Inevitably, there are films in which just about everything that could have gone wrong, does. Why throw a dog of a movie to a pack of wolves if you can avoid it?

Also, some movie genres get a much fairer shake from critics than others. Let's face it: Film critics are movie buffs first–and as such, they're much more inclined to rave about an independent film than a horror flick. And they invariably prefer sharp wit to sophomoric humor. Little surprise, then, that the "unseen 11" skew heavily to subject matter that reviewers are prone to disdain.

But there have always been bad films, and critics always had their biases when it comes to genre. The tactic of skipping advance screenings is taking hold now because the dynamics of movie marketing and pre-release publicity have changed. Like other professional arbiters of taste, movie reviewers just don’t matter quite as much as they used to. Once upon a time, they were the point of origin for popular opinion. In an age of ratings Web sites and consumer-generated content, they are just one voice of many. Maybe a particularly authoritative voice, but no longer the popes they used to be,

Movie Web site RottenTomatoes.com operates on the hive mind principle. Read a review and you get an opinion–hit or miss. But aggregate dozens of reviews in one place and you get a good sense whether a movie is worth watching. Not that we would ever do such a thing ourselves, but there have even been reports of people using RottenTomatoes.com ratings to talk their better halves out of going to, say, a romantic comedy.

Aggregation and indexing have also had the unintended consequence of flattening the hierarchy of movie critics: Inevitably, The New York Times or Chicago Tribune reviewers are taken off their perch when their sound bites appear next to Movie Mom at Yahoo! Movies, Ericdsnider.com, or (our favorite) Hollywood Bitchslap. Even worse, their opinions are devalued when they become just one datapoint in an average score.

If professional critics aren't what they used to be, amateur aficionados haven't wasted a moment filling the gap. There are millions of consumer-generated Web sites and blogs on just about every topic, including every movie genre, sub-genre and sub-sub-genre. Many of these sites are particularly effective at generating word of mouth among die-hard fans on just about every topic. For movie studios, fan outreach represents a golden opportunity. As it happens, many of the mainstream critics' least favorite genres, such as horror or sci-fi, have fan bases that use the Internet heavily and accept the opinion of a passionate amateur over that of a critic any day. It won’t be long until the next big horror release is pre-screened to top horror bloggers, while professional critics are left out in the cold.

The upside for viewers: RottenTomatoes.com and its ilk help viewers avoid bad movie decisions. The downside for studios: Aggregate and fan reviews help moviegoers avoid bad movie decisions. The ultimate upside for studios, however, remains that some people will see bad movies no matter what: Benchwarmers–one of the "unscreened 11"–got only 11% on RottenTomatoes' aggregate index. Even so, it came in second on its opening weekend, pulling in a respectable $19.7 million.

Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollak are partners at Reason Inc., a marketing-strategy consulting firm that works with clients in a range of categories, including media and entertainment, financial and professional services, packaged goods and the public sector. They are also the writers of Being Reasonable: The Blog.