"Also, Siskel & Ebert was a great TV show because studios would provide extended clips from each movie for them to break down. No studio will do that in 2025. They have IP to jealously guard, and they don't need film critics when they can game every Rotten Tomatoes score and populate every screening with influencers instead of people who might tell the public that their movie blows."
"What upside is there in allowing two haughty dudes from Chicago to potentially trash your movie on national television? Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert may have been masters of their chosen form, but it's an art form that show business no longer values in any meaningful way. Studios in 2025 can just take blurbs from randos on Twitter and put those in a TV ad instead."
Internet-era distribution and studio control have reduced the commercial need for traditional film critics. Studios no longer provide extended clips for televised critique and increasingly guard intellectual property. Marketing teams manipulate Rotten Tomatoes scores, populate screenings with influencers, and extract social-media blurbs to use in ads while obscuring attribution. Those tactics increase short-term revenue but sideline critical voices and reduce public-facing accountability. Some audience members resent critics for early access, spoilers, and perceived elitism, yet those resentments coincided with a broader industry shift that left many established critics marginalized or redundant.
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