Projectionist Fired After Posting Early "Fantastic Four" Review

Movie fanboy website Ain't It Cool News has long posted early reviews from anonymous writers. The studios have usually tolerated this practice, especially when it comes to their comic-book adaptations, because AICN is considered an influential tastemaker, and really, there wasn't much they could do about it. But that wasn't the case this past Saturday when Jesse Morrison (going by the moniker "Memflix") posted an a negative review of the Fox's Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. On Monday, Morrison, a 29-year-old projectionist for the Malco Theater chain in Memphis (who also readied prints for press and trade screenings) was called into a meeting with his boss, senior vp Jimmy Tashie, and according to Morrison, was "suspended until further notice" with the indication that he wouldn't be asked to return. Morrison claims that Tashie said that Fox has called him and was upset that someone at his company has posted an early review and threatened to take away press and trade screenings. Tashie acknowledges the call from Fox but denies that the studio has anything to do with the firing. Meanwhile, AICN's "Moriarty" (AKA Drew McWeeney) is taking Fox to task:

For a megacorporation who make hundreds of millions of dollars a year whether they're cranking out dogshit or the occasional decent movie, they sure are a bunch of giant pussies when it comes to the slightest criticism of their films. Our reviewer, Jesse Morrison, known here on the site as Memflix, was a projectionist who ran trade screenings for a theater chain. He's written many reviews for us before, but when he wrote one for FANTASTIC FOUR, Fox went into hypersensitive overdrive. They tracked him down and had him fired, threatening to pull their business from the entire chain over that review.

Think about that for a minute... this is one megacorporation threatening to blackball another corporation because one guy didn't like their movie and had the stones to say so.

So fuck you, Fox. There are ways to handle these things, and you have proven over and over that you not only hate your audience, but you don't want to know what they think. All you care about is the filthy lucre.

So was Malco (and Fox) being too harsh on young Memflix? I don't think so. I'm all for people expressing their opinions, but Morrison knew what he was doing would be considered "wrong" in the eyes of his bosses, or else he wouldn't have been using an alias. He took a risk and now he's paying the price. That's life. Here's some advice: next time, don't get caught. And yes, Fox cares about making money. There not making big, noisy, expensive comic-book adaptations for art's sake. And they have a lot invested in this franchise, having just announced a Silver Surfer spinoff. Fox and AICN have never had a very close relationship, but in the past, I have witnessed other producers bending over backward to curry favor with the site. But this makes me think that times are changing. Perhaps because of the proliferation of other sites, the tastemaking power of AICN is starting to wane. We'll just have to see--Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer opens this weekend.

It's curtains for a critical projectionist [The Hollywood Reporter]

[Photo: FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER, Fox, Everett Collection]