“The Chicago Film Critics Association has attracted scads of attention and even more sympathy this week for its boycott of films released by 20th Century Fox,” the Reeler‘s Stu Van Airsdale has written.
“The notoriously press-hating studio pushed back its previews of The Simpsons Movie to all-media screenings a few nights before the July 27 release; this was the last straw for the group led by Chicago Daily Herald critic Dann Gire, who sent word to Fox publicists that he and his colleagues would no longer contribute features or profiles about Fox films.
“Reviews, evidently, are exempt. The Los Angeles Times and Radar Online, among others, laid out the ‘problem’ over the last few days: Fox’s hostility to online media, where coverage and reviews leak at a rate that studio reps feel compromise their control, is no longer acceptable, particularly when that hostility extends to print critics, whose convenient sense of outrage defers only to their enduring sense of entitlement.”