So it seems that a 29-year-old Memphis, Tennessee projectionist working for the Malco Theatre chain
has lost his job after writing an early review of 20th Century Fox’s Fantastic
Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer for the web site Ain’t It Cool News.

Jesse Morrison, who pens write-ups under the screen name Memflix, crushed the film in a review, and then got canned — or, sorry, “suspended without further notice” — two days later, after Malco received a phone call from Fox. No demands were made, insisted Malco Senior VP Jimmy Tashie, but the intimation/popular conjecture is that Fox put the screws to Malco, threatening to pull screening business or deal with them unfavorably somewhere down the line if punitive measures weren’t taken.

Predictably, AICN’s Drew McWeeny circled the wagons and launched into a Fox-bashing tirade over the matter, while Morrison himself milked the cow of sympathy and stuck a moistened finger of pitiable measurement to the air, saying, in The Hollywood Reporter, “I’m hoping to get a job as a professional movie reviewer, but I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. I guess you could say I’m at some kind of crossroads right now.”

<Deep sigh> Can anyone really be surprised over this? Morrison says he didn’t autograph a non-disclosure agreement, nor was he ever asked to, in which case he says he would have signed. OK, fine. Still, I have to figure it’s within Malco’s right to fire him for such an offense (e.g., they can find something in their HR policy manuals to justify), and the guy’s an idiot if he didn’t recognize the danger inherent in what he was doing as an unaffiliated stringer. Do what you’re gonna do, but at least have the stones to own it in the end, and not go mock-shocked or hat-in-hand after the fact.

It may seem like big, bad, tit-for-tat corporate reciprocation, but it’s a game that’s played all the time in Hollywood and everywhere else. What do you think Fox was doing when they dumped Mike Judge’s Idiocracy like a murder victim last fall, tossing it out in 130 theaters (including zero in New York City) in a mere seven cities early September in an unpublicized, cover-of-night release? They were playing corporate hardball, the popular rumor — never addressed by Fox — being that certain other corporations didn’t respond nicely to Judge’s futuristic lampooning of their products, names and brands, and pressured Fox to squash the film. So… Fox gave the movie its contractual release, but offered no screenings, advance word, etc. — this for a director whose cult hit Office Space moved millions of units on DVD purely on the strength of word-of-mouth. Draw your own conclusions. It’s all about pressure points, people. Anthony Hopkins’ Fracture character would certainly approve…