Disney Hype

This week Disney is running some absurd ads for the new HANNAH MONTANA movie including hype from one critic who claimed that the movie "is the best" of this year. This is outrageous. What serious critic would even nominate this film for an Oscar for example? Certainly this is not the best film of the year so far by any means. Rotten Tomatoes gives this new film a weak 46% approval so far, with most critics not really liking this movie very much, and certainly not praising it as "the best" film of the year so far.

The HANNAH MONTANA movie is no doubt perfectly good entertainment for it's intended target audience of young girls who adore Miley Cyrus and buy her records and enjoy all her licensed Disney products and TV shows and specials. But critical endorsements of films is greatly cheapened when films such as this abuse critical praise just to hype the films in order to fill theatres and drive up box office numbers. This is cheap marketing of the very worst kind. This lacks real integrity.

The movie-going public should be able to have some level of trust in the what the critics say. But they often cannot. Often the critical comments are nearly generated merely as another marketing tool of the motion picture companies.

Another problem is movie hype that takes comments of the critics far out of context. The classic example was a confused film that was such a mess that Larry King once said that you'd have to "see it twice" to make any sense of it. Of course, some enterprising movie studio began running ads with "SEE IT TWICE" and signing Larry King's name to it.

Not all movie praise is really good. Buyer beware.