Why is Peter Debruge leaving Variety? Why would he throw away a nice, well-salaried gig at the top of the heap…why abandon his position one of the industry’s most listened-to film critics? It doesn’t calculate.
Apparently Debruge, who’s been with Variety since ’05 (21 years) just wanted to make a change in order to make a change. A friend says “he’s got a lot of irons in the fire”, and apparently wants to do something aside from (or above and beyond) the cricket game.
Super-smart, uber-knowledgable and never missing a trick, Peter has always seemed (to me anyway) like an obliging, generous-hearted fellow who has always been reluctant to scold filmmakers. He’s always had much more in common, attitude-wise, with the film buff-ish Martin Scorsese or Francois Truffaut in his Cahiers du Cinema days. I’m not saying “butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth” but Debruge has certainly never written with any kind of stinging, knife-like, John Simon-ish mentality.