Projectionist Fired For Panning "Rise of the Silver Surfer"

Jesse Morrison, a 29-year-old film video and journalism major at the University of Memphis and a projectionist for Memphis' Malco Theater chain, was fired after he wrote an early negative review of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer for the website Ain't It Cool News. (The review, written under his online pen-name Memflix, was entitled "Memflix Crushes All Hope For Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer"). Morrison also wrote reviews for Malco's movie blog and a circular distributed in the theater.

Morrison insists that 20th-Century-Fox, distributor of Rise of the Silver Surfer, pressured the theater chain to have him fired; the company has denied the charges. Perhaps Malco felt that one of their own projectionists giving a bad review to a movie that would be showing on many of their screens represented a conflict of interest. The idea that one early negative review could damage the box-office prospects of a Hollywood juggernaut like Rise of the Silver Surfer is simply laughable, especially considering that the movie's mostly lukewarm reviews did not prevent it from rising to the top of the box-office last weekend. What is not laughable, but scary, is the idea that unpopular opinions in movie criticism should not be tolerated; if every critic said the same thing, criticism would cease to have a purpose.