Hollywood Admits Who Holds Cultural Power

For over a century, Hollywood relied on advance critic screenings to sell tickets. Studio marketing departments would wait for reviews to show up in newspapers and magazines and on TV. Then they would cherry-pick the best quotes in their ads.

But amid the flash and bluster of recent blockbuster movie seasons, Hollywood’s old promotional model effectively folded.

A recent piece on the marketing campaign for Tom Cruise’s latest film revealed that Hollywood studios are replacing traditional critics with online influencers. Instead of courting newspaper reviewers, they are inviting hundreds of social media personalities to exclusive screenings. The underlying logic is that audiences now place greater confidence in familiar internet faces than legacy media tastemakers.

The majority of commenters who see the fall of critics as another victory for influencers misunderstand the full magnitude of what’s happened.

For most of the twentieth century, institutions controlled attention because they controlled distribution. Newspaper and magazine editors and TV network executives decided which reviewers got national audiences. Therefore, they chose the handful of critics who set audience preferences.

The internet has now turned that dynamic on its head. Most people now follow reviewers whose tastes match their own. They discover pop culture commentators through YouTube recommendations, Instagram reels, and TikTok clips.

It used to be that institutions introduced people to influencers. Now, online influencers are institutions.

Read the full post on Substack.

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