Why film criticism has been dead longer than you think

Film criticism died long before people decided that TENET was “humorless,” and well before the Marvel Cinematic Universe gave us 3 cinematic TV seasons of one-liners, quips and lighthearted fun for the whole family. 

No, the truth is it started well before that when studios decided to give more greenlights to blockbusters filled with popcorn fun to pad their box office instead of more original thought provoking work that could be considered art. 

Of course like anything opinionated, this is all subjective, but it’s very easy to spot the difference between a Christopher Nolan science fiction thriller and a Russo brothers directed MCU epic. One of those movies is designed to make a family of four go back to the theater multiple times to watch it. The other is Inception, or Interstellar. 

Let’s be clear here though, the MCU never created this problem. It was an issue in Hollywood long before that franchise was even thought of. It’s the reason that the late Joel Schumacher’s Batman films are considered “toy commercials,” or why Transformers and Resident Evil get franchises while films like Gattaca and Children of Men aren’t even on the general audience radar. It all comes down to money and attention. 

Studios want as much of your money as possible and most of the time cast as wide of a net as possible to get it. That’s why PG13 is the optimal rating and “fun” is the feeling of the day. At the same time, critics want as much of your attention as possible and they know that they can get with shock value, so reviews are no longer about actual analysis of a film for aesthetics reasons. Now it’s all about how you can get the reader fired up to click on your link or retweet your incredibly shallow insult of an actor, director or film itself. 

These are all moves of desperation too, because critics know they are on borrowed time and so do the studios. The Streaming Wars are ramping up and traditional Hollywood is starting to fade away, meaning that reading a review and using that review to make a choice on going to the theater is now becoming signing up for a service and giving a movie a chance because all it took was a couple of clicks on your computer, streaming box remote or phone, without even leaving your home. The audience is starting to not need theaters to see new films and they’re really starting to not need critics to help them decide what films to watch. 

So faced with this existential crisis, the studios and the critics are appealing to the lowest common denominator in hopes of keeping their traditional operations afloat. Instead of wider releases for Ex Machina and Annihilation, it’s over 4000 screens for another James Bond, Fast and Furious or live action Disney remake, and instead of actual constructive critique on a director’s work, it’s 1000 words or less on why that director is the worst filmmaker known to mankind, which will either get shared a thousand times for laughs or hatred and it doesn’t matter which, because it’s all web traffic, which keeps them afloat. 

That’s the real problem facing film criticism and really all of journalism today, and it’s why the MCU at most is a symptom of that problem, not the reason behind it. Hollywood and the film elite have playing in the shallow end of the pool for a lot longer than 12 years now, and until the audience itself changes behaviors and ignores the shallow stuff, it’s going to continue, even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic grinding the industry to a halt on numerous levels. 

Keep that in mind the next time you retweet a critic or label that calls Christopher Nolan’s work “humorless.” Are you really taking a stand for the future of film criticism, or are you just giving them the attention they desperately need, one way or another? Food for thought.