Movie Producer Sues Variety Over Bad Review

from the entitlement-culture dept

This is becoming all too common. We recently wrote about the lawyer who sued a publisher over a negative review of her book. Apparently, this sort of thing is becoming more common. The producer of an independent movie called Iron Cross, Joshua Newton, is suing Variety for posting a negative review of his movie after he bought a huge advertising spread from the magazine. In trying to defend the lawsuit, Newton lays out how Variety courted him over a huge advertising deal, suggesting the magazine would help find the film a distributor and also get it into consideration for the Oscars. Of course, nothing in that meant that the magazine's reviews should be compromised. Newton's argument isn't exactly going to win him much support:

I'm not suing them over a bad review. The problem we had was the timing. Robert Koehler, the critic, could have put it on his own website. If he'd have written it for TheWrap it would have just been one of those things. The problem was that Variety should have waited until the campaign was over. They completely destroyed the campaign that they sold us.

Basically, he seems to be suggesting that because he bought hundreds of thousands of ads from Variety, the magazine isn't allowed to post an honest review of the flick. Fascinating.

Newton, by the way, goes on to suggest that the business side at Variety knows it made a mistake, and that the recent firings of Variety's in-house movie critics is to more easily "control" movie reviews, so that Variety doesn't run reviews that trash movies that have paid lots of money to advertise with Variety. If true, of course, that would basically destroy whatever credibility Variety has left. Even so, though, suing over a bad movie review -- just because you bought ads in the magazine -- doesn't make much sense.

Filed Under: ad buy, entitlement, iron cross, joshua newton, movies, reviews
Companies: variety