Exhibitors challenge movie critics (and vice versa) at CinemaCon

The non-International Day programming at CinemaCon 2014 in Las Vegas began with a fun, loose event that instantly energized this annual gathering of the National Association of Theatre Owners. Matt Atchity, editor-in-chief of the highly influential movie review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, and senior editor Grae Drake hosted a session entitled "Rotten Tomatoes vs. the Audience: The Relevance of Film Critics Today," with a panel including veteran critic Leonard Maltin, USA Today's Claudia Puig, Scott Mantz of "Access Hollywood," and former Associated Press critic Christy Lemire.

With Drake as witty intermediary in the audience, exhibitors were encouraged to come to the mike and defend a film they felt didn't get a fair shake from critics or call out a movie they thought was overrrated. The results bore out Maltin's observation that our passions about movies are a very subjective thing indeed. One woman said she just didn't get all the fuss over Gravity; another volunteer said he found 12 Years a Slave sluggish and not that revelatory. Others rose to the defense of box-office bombs John Carter and Battleship. Puig and Lemire both came down hard on the oeuvre of director John Lee Hancock (Saving Mr. Banks, The Blind Side), decrying his sentimental tendencies, and the murmurs in the audience revealed a true divide between critics and theatre folk.

One volunteer wrestled with his feelings over Ridley Scott's The Counselor, admitting he enjoyed the overwrought melodrama even though he knew it was a bad film. Maltin reassured him, saying there aren't enough "so bad it's good" movies. "There's nothing to be said for mediocre films," he observed. "If you're going to see a bad movie, make it as bad as The Counselor."

Asked whether film critics need to adjust their criteria when evaluating a movie aimed at a certain demographic such as the Twilight series, Maltin answered, "I can't pretend to be a teenage girl or an action-movie junkie. People know a critic's mindset." Just as a critic is mindful of the audience, "the audience is mindful of us too," he argued.

One audience member asked whether critics truly have any impact on box office. For a Transformers or a Twilight with a built-in audience, no, but the enthusiasm of critics saved a movie like The Hurt Locker from obscurity and eventually brought it to the Oscar podium, Maltin noted. But The Hurt Locker was still a box-office underperformer, the exhibitor pointed out. True, the panel relented, but critics can still "start the conversation" that turns a movie like Slumdog Millionaire with no apparent audience hook into a box-office success.

It's a new age for film criticism, the panel observed, with "so many more people writing with a wide audience than ever before." Maltin noted that in this digital, web-connected age, "everybody's a moviemaker, everybody's a musician, everybody's a writer." Thanks to this "democratization of creativity," knowing who to trust isn't as clear as when the dividing lines between professional and amateur critic were clear. "The challenge is sifting through and finding the smart ones."

—Kevin Lally