Slate’s Erik Lundegaard deploys a lot of calculation and a spreadsheet or two in an attempt to quantify the effect good reviews have on the bottom line of film box office:

It’s almost a given these days that movie critics are elitist, while moviegoers are populist. When the highest-grossing films get panned by critics, what good are critics? As publishers across the country dump their reviewers, this is not exactly a rhetorical question.

Believe it or not, though, critically acclaimed films generally do better than critically panned films at the box office—if you measure their performance in the right way.

I think he makes his case, though it is to some extent tautological. (I mean, of course published articles in papers across the country saying, in effect, that people should go see a particular film will induce people to do just that, just as the amount of ad money spent on any particular film will do the same thing.) The issue is also made murkier by the way film criticism is actually practiced at most mainstream print outlets*.

But there’s a gem in Lundegaard’s piece, in the penultimate graf:

If I were a publisher, though, I’d hire the best critic I could find and have him or her write two reviews: a short one, to be printed the day or week the movie opens and that gives away little of the plot but tells readers whether it’s good or bad (the service aspect); and a longer, more in-depth review that discusses the entire film, to be posted online (the critical aspect). Then I’d put a message board beneath the in-depth review and sit back. Most people don’t want to hear about a movie before they’ve seen it but would love to discuss it afterward. Boy, would they ever.

This sort of thing is becoming more prevalent, as increasing numbers of daily critics take up blogging, but isn’t it a smart idea to institutionalize some variation on Lundegaard’s scheme as part of the paper’s struggle to remain relevant in the sphere of covering national cultural product? As I’ve written before, why should residents of a particular town pay any attention to the local film critic, who is going to suck in comparison to the national-level criticism now easily obtainable through the web?  A local critic, however, who is the de facto arbiter of the film discussion in a particular town, who could provide some kind of personal response to commenters and could even salt the comments with local references, might be a potent tool for a particular paper to hang on to some part of the readership it will inevitably lose for coverage of non-local art events.

* By which I mean a couple of things. For one, in local dailies, still a powerful force, critics long ago gave up giving blockbuster actioners bad reviews. Faced with the prospect of reiterating, week after week, “Well, here’s another frenetic, senseless action movie” and the resulting suicidal tendencies, critics eventually give in, looking for a few nice promotional things to say and saving the (tepid) criticism for the last grafs. (”Joe Blow’s screenplay won’t win any Oscars, but it’s serves its purpose here. …”) Secondly, even when the reviews for a big-budget film are unequivocably bad, the papers typically undercut the criticism with front-page refers (complete with little photos of the film’s star, be it monster or human) and big play on the fronts of the entertainment sections, all with headlines that as a rule give little hint of the opinions in the review.

————

Previously in Hitsville:

The year of the disappearing film critics