Cinematical

» see cinematical.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Cinematical was the Weblogs Inc title I never opened. The network's hardware and software blogs were unavoidable for an engineering student with a feed reader in 2006 and I read those constantly, but a daily American film blog was a different appetite. Mine went elsewhere. I am writing this one off the archive rather than off memory.

It started in 2005. The earliest front page anyone kept is 13 March 2005, and the archive menu on it lists exactly one month, which tells you how new the thing was. Karina Longworth was the founding editor, hired by Weblogs Inc to build a film blog the way the network built everything: one narrow obsession, several posts a day, a byline that argued with you. AOL bought the whole network that October for somewhere around $25 million.

For five years it worked. Cinematical sent people to Sundance and SXSW, ran interviews and reviews at a volume no magazine could match, and became one of the handful of film sites that got studio access without being a trade paper. Then in late 2010 AOL folded it into Moviefone and it stopped being a site with a front door. It became a category inside somebody else's ticketing service.

In February 2011 AOL bought The Huffington Post for $315 million and put Arianna Huffington over everything it published. What happened to Cinematical happened six weeks later, and it took about four days.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the first week of april ~

Scott Weinberg had already gone, walking out around SXSW over editorial interference he would not accept. William Goss had gone too. On 5 April 2011 Erik Davis, the editor in chief, announced he was leaving. The next day the freelance budget went with him, in the round of cuts that emptied AOL's freelance rosters across the company.

Davis and Weinberg landed at Movies.com within weeks and Peter Hall went with them, which is the part people remember, because the writers were the product and the writers were fine. What nobody arranged a landing for was the name. AOL owned it and had no reason to close it, so it did not close it.

~ the shell ~

Pull up cinematical.com on 7 January 2012 and you get a page that says Cinematical at the top and Moviefone in three hundred places under the hood. The theater listings are current. The DVD releases are dated the first week of January. The Cinematical block, the actual editorial, is showing an interview about Your Highness, a film that had come out the previous April.

That is what a brand looks like when the people are gone and the CMS is not. The same posts sat under a live header for nine months, still indexed, still collecting whatever search traffic came in.

~ where the url went ~

The archive settles the date and no article anywhere carries it. The last capture of cinematical.com serving its own page is 7 January 2012. By 3 February it answers with a 302, and the target is news.moviefone.com. Every capture after that, for years, is the same zero-length redirect.

So the staff exodus was April 2011 and the press wrote about it, and the actual end was a DNS-level decision in January 2012 that nobody wrote about at all. Moviefone itself was gutted by Verizon a few years later and the redirect stopped resolving to anything worth reading.

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