Todd McCarthy‘s decision to accept the top-dog film critic slot at the Hollywood Reporter is cool as far as it goes. Much better compensation than he was getting from Indiewire, that’s for sure. Plus he wasn’t filing all that much. Indiewire columnist Anne Thompson wrote this evening that “the adjustment from 30 years of working with a Variety support system to the independence of a blog was tough for McCarthy.”

But if you’re talking tough adjustments, what about poor Kirk Honeycutt, the Reporter‘s lead critic for eons who’s been elbowed aside by the McCarthy hire and been re-assigned as the trade’s “international critic” — obviously a sop and a demotion. But where’s he going to go?