Leakage from digital media is shutting down the long-standing practice of allowing critics to post reviews on films in festivals long before the same films go into general release. Back in the day, those reviews were published in trade publications seen only by in-the-business professionals.
Now, trade-press reviews online get picked up by others and so Italy’s venerable Venice Film Festival asks its accredited journalists to wait until a film hits general release. Other festivals have varying degrees of new restrictions too, says a Variety story. “Festivals have increasingly come under pressure from filmmakers and distributors when first reactions have erupted online ahead of a filmís red-carpet premiere,” says the Variety story by Robert Mitchell.
It’s a problem building for years. “Blog postings from moviegoers and news reports picked up from analog media can race through cyberspace, upsetting marketing plans,” says the third edition of book “Marketing to Moviegoersî” “For example, a background actor working during filming of ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ gave an interview to his small hometown newspaper about his experience as an extra and inadvertently leaked movie plot twists that got picked up on the Internet.”
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