20th Century Fox Hates the Internet

All movie studios are run primarily by elderly white men who, like all elderly white men, are frightened by the Internet. Their predecessors were equally terrified by television and, before that, talkies. But 20th Century Fox's policies have been the most obviously anti-Internet in recent months.

The latest example is recounted at The Movie Blog, where we learn that Fox ordered YouTube to remove a legitimate review of Reno 911!: Miami. Ostensibly, the reason was that the review contained portions of the film's trailer, which is copyrighted material. The problem is the trailer is made by the studio as a means of promotion and is publicly available to be downloaded by anyone who wants it. Fox WANTS you to download its movie trailers! But now all of a sudden the studio wants to guard their use?

Furthermore, using clips from the trailer falls under the category of "fair use," a well-established legal right that says that a reviewer may quote small excerpts from the work he's reviewing.

It will not surprise you to learn that the review in question was very negative. Would Fox have ordered YouTube to remove a positive review of Reno 911!: Miami? This question is purely academic as no positive reviews of Reno 911!: Miami are known to exist. But you can guess what the answer would be.

Movie studios try to convince you they're "hip" and "with it." They set up MySpace pages for their movies and clutter up your favorite sites with insufferable banner ads. But honestly, they're scared to death of the Internet. The medium's been in widespread use by regular people for well over a decade, and movie studios still don't have a clue what to do with it.

Fox is also notorious for giving online film critics the shaft. Standard practice in 2007 has been to provide a press-only screening of films a week before they open, but only for critics who write for newspapers. Onliners have to wait for a night-before-opening screening, one to which the public is invited, too, making it a chaotic and boisterous affair.

Why? Well, there's still this lingering fear that if you show a movie to an online film critic early, he'll immediately post a spoiler-filled review on his website. It doesn't help that some sites actually do this. (I'm looking at you, Ain't It Cool News, but I'm shielding my eyes from your gigantic fonts, your third-grade-level spelling, and your cruel abuse of exclamation points.) Those early-review-posters give the other 95 percent of us a bad name, and Fox and other studios continue to eye online writers with suspicion.

The flaw in that reasoning isn't just that most onliners obey the rule of not posting reviews early. The flaw is that all critics are "online critics" now. All newspapers have websites, and they often post reviews early. Variety routinely publishes its film reviews several days before the films open. But what's Fox going to do? Stop inviting Variety to its press screenings? Of course not. Variety is powerful. Online film critics, for the most part, are not.

Which is somewhat backwards. The vast majority of movie tickets are bought by young people. And where do young people get their movie reviews? Not from daily newspapers that's for sure (all due respect to my friends and colleagues in that field). Young people get almost all of their news and opinions from the Internet, and that probably makes the Web all the more terrifying to Fox and the other studios. They're trying to reach out to people who have fully embraced something that the studios are baffled by. No wonder they're panicky.

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Eric D. Snider is an online critic. You can tell because he has a website.

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