One of my favorite writers, Nathan Rabin, has an astute piece up at Cracked enumerating 5 truths about film criticism. My favorite? Number 4:
Film Critics Are Not Influential Or Important Enough To Bribe: When DC Films endured vicious critical beatdowns for its massive comic book tentpoles Batman V. Superman: Dawn Of Justice and Suicide Squad, the internet was filled with ridiculous and angry accusations that Marvel was using its financial and corporate muscle to bribe critics into giving negative reviews to the work of its comic book archrival. If Marvel did bribe film critics into sabotaging DC Films’ commercial chances by giving negative reviews, they failed spectacularly. Oh sure, Batman V. Superman and Suicide Squad each garnered scathing reviews, but that didn’t seem to have much of an effect on their box office performances. People simply threw up their middle fingers and slapped down the cash.
Rabin captures how weirdly personal some of the attacks against critics can get. Readers often think of critics as elitist, which is rather bizarre given that the vast majority of film critics don’t make a high salary, and film criticism itself is a dying industry, with critics getting fired from major newspapers left and right.
The only thing I wish Rabin had called out a bit more is that there are a bunch of vocal outliers in the community. Film critics do make mistakes sometimes. They do sometimes judge movies unfairly. They do all sorts of things that sour the public’s perception of the profession. While outliers are by definition not representative of the community, they are a big reason why many of these misconceptions exist.