What’s with Todd McCarthy‘s There Will be Blood review being posted ten or fifteen minutes ago on the Variety website instead of next Monday (i.e., concurrent with the Castro theatre screening in San Francisco), which is what the embargo was supposed to be?

I saw Paul Thomas Anderson‘s film with McCarthy on 10.25 (along with Variety‘s Kris Tapley and Anne Thompson), but I’m holding my horses for another four days, like I said I would. It just goes to show what a rough and tumble game the earlybird reviewing game is. A deal is a deal until somebody breaks it or writes their own rules or cuts a new deal with one of the publciists.

I’m guessing that because McCarthy says only admiring and respectful things about this epic-sized film, Paramount Vantage wanted it out as the first word that would “set the tone,” as it were.