Who Needs Critics?

Want to bring down a movie critic a couple notches? Mention the box office charts.

The video game adaptation "Silent Hill" slinked to the top of the box office this weekend, pulling in an estimated $20.2 million, knocking out "Scary Movie 4," which held the top spot the weekend before. Neither film was screened for critics, meaning reviews of the flicks were hard to come by. Withholding preview screenings is a practice traditionally reserved for bottom-feeding films that studios know are stinkers. The method avoids the negative attention from vicious advance reviews, but the supposed pitfall was always that savvy audiences would be alarmed by the lack of information about a movie and avoid it altogether. Blockbuster franchises aside, it was always thought that to take the top spot, a film would need that extra boost of positive press.

Well, 2006 has destroyed that little myth. The trend started the first weekend of the year, when "Hostel" went unscreened and still earned the top spot. A frightening (to us) truth has been revealed - moviegoers by and large don't care what critics have to say about movies. They'll catch the trailers and commercials, peep the Letterman or Leno interviews, and maybe read the latest Entertainment Weekly suck-up feature for the big star of the week. Then they decide what movie to see, regardless of whatever critical quality control analyses are floating around. And that's exactly the way the studios want it. It's a sad and scary scenario, though, for critics and moviegoers.