Interesting article in the Guardian by Mark Lawson this morning about publicists trying to release movies, books and TV shows without critics even seeing them – to save potential bad reviews.

It seems that increasingly the press are only getting to see movies at the very first public screenings (Friday afternoon on the day of release), because the film distributors and publicists are stopping newspaper reviewers seeing the film before the public.

The whole thing got me thinking a bit – does anyone really need the press reviews to judge whether to see a film or buy a book or not?  Certainly – if I see a trailer for a film and it looks OK, I’ll go and see it regardless of what the newspaper reviewers say. More than often, I’ll find out about a film release from a buzz on the ‘net and I might even do a quick search for comments made across the hundreds of blogs and websites that specialise in movies.

In fact – that’s the whole point, the web has democratised the process so much that press reviews have become negligible in their influence, sites like Metacritic have sprung up to aggregate the average reviews and tell us what a much wider base of people think about a film or book or whatever.

That just leaves the press reviewers like Anton Ego from Ratatouille – found out for the snobbish, elitist club members that they are.