The Hollywood Reporter, due to reported $15 million per year losses, has decided to let go of its chief film critic Todd McCarthy.
A longtime veteran of film criticism, I count McCarthy as a legend of the field — up there with Ebert, Kael, Sarris … McCarthy’s perceptive and eloquent writing merged into books (read “Kings of the Bs”) and non-fiction filmmaking, his 1992 film “Visions of Light” is, far and away, the best documentary ever made about cinematography.
Best of luck, Mr. McCarthy, can’t wait to see your writing reappear soon.
The gutting of THR marks the end of an era. THR had become much more relevant to the film industry, especially after Variety was revamped under the Penske ownership and turned into a PR machine with little hard content. Todd McCarthy, whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many times at Cannes and other festivals, was always one of the top film critics in the industry and just an overall good guy. One of the last old-school film critics.
This is yet another death in the world of “print” and this coming after Kenneth Turan’s departure from the Los Angeles Times, this almost does kinda feel like the end of an era. Blame it on COVID, blame it on greed or just blame it on a shape-shifting industry — It doesn’t matter, this is depressing.
Today’s media is only concerned with ass-kissing and sucking up to the major studios, shoving ideas and thoughts which down people’s throats until they accept them. Essentially fluff propaganda. For this, they don’t need to pay a person with a film studies degree to abide. They can just pay a blogger minimum wage, or no wage at all, to write a fluff review that won’t ruffle any feathers at the studios and won’t upset any of the PR companies. Call it the dumbing down of America, where intelligent discussion/criticism about movies is now called “trolling” and overt flattery of mediocrity is called legitimate journalism.
Excerpt of an Op-ed McCarthy wrote for Deadline immediately after his firing was announced:
“A month ago I was surprised, out of nowhere, to get a nice raise. Yesterday I got the boot. By guys I’ve never met. Apparently if you make over a certain amount, you’re suddenly too expensive for the new owners of The Hollywood Reporter, which has recently been reported as losing in the vicinity of $15 million per year. Dozens are being forced to walk the plank. It’s a bloodbath.
“What were the bosses thinking when they gave me a raise last month? What on earth are they thinking now? As I said to The New York Times when I was let go from Variety just over a decade ago, ‘It’s the end of something.’ What the next something is — for everyone is our business — seems less knowable than ever.”
Of course, we all know the rule: take these reactions with a grain of salt rather than treating them as gospel. Still, I will say that the film tested like gangbusters earlier this year, and Lionsgate clearly has confidence.