Hollywood studios embrace online critics’ blurbs

Brook Barnes at the New York Times has a story about how Hollywood studios are getting more and more comfortable with the practice of mining reviews from online-only critics for use in ads for their movies.

All in all I’m completely in favor of such a practice, as long as it sticks to certain ethical standards about not cobbling together a blurb from three or four reviews, not promoting blurbs about marketing materials as if it were a review of the film itself and other guidelines. But those are the same guidelines I’d hope (hope) studios would adhere to when pulling a quote from a mainstream critic. The practice of pulling quotes from reviews has always been meant to give the movie a stamp of approval from a figure the audience had assigned a level of authority. For much of the past that’s meant finding the highest-profile critic that was positive about the movie but now, with audience media consumption habits shifting online, it only makes sense to look to online critics for those quotes.

Studios aren’t, though, taking this idea to next logical level just yet. By that I mean to say they’re not adjusting their website strategy to also embrace online reviews. Very few official movie websites link out, a topic I’ve covered before in depth. Adding links to online reviews from a film’s site only makes sense, especially when we’re talking about smaller movies that have appeared on the festival circuit and so have already garnered a healthy amount of reviews, interviews and other write-ups.

Think about Moon, the marketing campaign for which I reviewed just yesterday. The film appeared at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and had a number of reviews written about it (mostly positive) as well as interviews by online movie writers of the film’s creative talent. It would have made a ton of sense for Moon’s official website to be filled to the brim with links to all that coverage. It only would have made a stronger case for the movie among its target audience, which is largely, I would wager, made up of regular readers of SpoutBlog, IndieWire, GreenCine and other sites and blogs that specialize in coverage and reviews of smaller, independent movies. If someone came to the movie’s site and saw a positive review from Karina Longworth – and can then read the whole thing – that’s going to carry a lot of weight.

It’s great that studios are viewing online critics with the same sort of eye they have historically viewed print and television critics. Now it’s time to take the next step and realize promoting those reviewers in their natural home – the web.